The ward I work in is Ward D and we have mostly patients that have had large tumors of the head, mouth, throat, thyroid which makes them a fairly high risk for air way management ie after surgery the tissues usually begin to swell and because of the area we are dealing with, rarely a patient has difficulty breathing. As a result, Ward D is kind of like our ICU. We have all ages which makes me happy because I usually at least have one patient that is under the age of 10 and coming from Neonatal in the USA, that is still BIG. :-) My day consists of lots of dressing changes (which take a lot of time because wounds are large and painful) and doing everything that usually involves a team at home.....my 8 month old needed an EKG...never had to do one before because we had a team that came to the bedside and did EKG's...lots of wires, no idea how to use the machine, where to place electrodes, yah...huge learning curve. This same little one needed a lab draw...Again no one but me for that one (no call to lab to have someone draw it!) There are feedings to hang or IVs to infuse and lots of antibiotics or pain medications to give. (Infection continues to be a problem here in spite of lots of hand sanitizer, teaching pt. to wash hands, keep hands away from incisions, etc. For example, most pts have a care giver with them who stays in hospital under the patients bed on a mattress. We realized recently that a mother was picking up the hem of her skirt to wipe her daughter's face after eating or when their was drainage from dressings....mother had worn that same skirt for the last 4 days, it had been dragging on the floor, let's not get more descriptive...she was quickly stopped when we saw it but how many times it had been done? Needless to say, the daughter has a bad wound infection. so sad but hygiene is a challenge to all in the third world! We keep educating but sometimes you can't keep ahead of what they are thinking/doing!)
To be continued later! internet going down in 5 min.!
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