Thursday, January 10, 2008

Wheeeeeeee! Care Plans!


No. That's not one of my cakes. There's something really odd about brown roses, but I will admit that I had the cake commissioned from Costco and the sentiment is what counts there. Of course, this was one of the cakes from our holiday party so the quarter is not now over. It was over then. Now I'm up late tippity typing away on a care plan. Somehow -and I don't know how- I've never done a care plan for someone who's had a myocardial infarction (that's a heart attack in common vernacular). I've danced around MI: I've done CHF. I've done atrial fibrillation. And who of my patient's hasn't had kidney failure related to high blood pressure? Arrythmias? check. Dysrythmias? check. OK: quit paying attention; they're the same thing. I know.

Here's the thing. I like doing care plans. Sorta. I like having the info about the disease all tidily written up. I like to have a list of the signs and symptoms. I'm a fan of the knowledge of complications and nursing interventions. I *really* want to know what the side effects of my pateint's medications are. It's good stuff and I go into my patient's room and am as semi-on-top of what's going on as a nursing student can be. So why are we nursing students always complaining about these things, these care plans? We-e-e-e-e-llllllll...A big part of it for me and perhaps you, my fellow nursing students, is that you have to spend hours and hours hunched typing at a computer w/ half of your nursing texts splayed in your lap, on the table behind you, on the window seat next to you and w/at least three web pages open from drug manufacturers and disease support group sites and all. It's a logistical nightmare and then it's also a formatting nightmare. I've always felt halfway computer savvy, but I'm constantly changing font sizes, adding or removing columns from tables and trying to make text fit where it doesn't want to. These monster crazy-quilt formatted things crash my computer every other sentence so I've become a nervous wreck w/ the CTRL-S. It's my care-plan-doin' nervous tic. And then there's all the "See Attached's" that I'll have to staple on later. And this is just the pre-care plan fun. The care plan itself with the activities and the analysis is where my fiction-writing skills need some special honing. I have to have goals and they have to be measurable and they have to be run through this systems theory machine created by past instructors at Nursing School U *and* it has to make sense and a lot of times I'm in there with my patient just trying to address the three million things that pop up in their day. Ooops. Plan. What plan? It only works out about half the time and I'm being pretty generous there. So. Um. That's a problem. Hurray! The quarter's over! ... in 10 more weeks.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

...and since there's no specific care plan..the instructor can kick it back to you for revisions indefinitely...that REALLY sucks.

Anonymous said...

Well written article.