Posts by gingerbo16

Another perspective on heart rate.

I used to have a resting HR of about 80-90 and would get up to 170-180s when working out. 

Now, I am on medication that lowers my HR. My resting HR in now in the 60s and when I work out I am in the 120s. 

Both rates are double the resting rate. I will say I feel a lot better with a HR in the 120s than the 180s... that was kind of uncomfortable.

I am an RN on a medical floor in a hospital and we often have "comfort care" (hospice/end of life patients).

A recent comfort care patient I had was completely with it and dying of respiratory failure. She was on a very high flow oxygen machine and it was the only thing keeping her alive. She wanted to come off of it and die but the anxiety of not being able to breathe was too much. I was able to provide IV pain meds (narcotics) alternating with IV anxiety meds/Ativan every hour until she did reach a point (about 3-4 hours later) where she was comfortable to be without O2 an not feel like she couldn't get air. She died shortly thereafter and I was privileged to be part of a "good death" for her. 

In other situations, patients are put on continuous narcotic/opiate IV infusions to help with pain and respiratory manifestations of the dying process. We often apply patches to dry up secretions so the family and patients do not have to experience the "death rattle" sound.

I have not known personally of anyone intentionally put in a coma to avoid the pain of death, however, with the medications we use to ease pain, and the increasing dosage strengths and frequencies required by these patients, often the opioids put the patient in a semi-comatose to comatose state.

In a situation of making someone comfortable who is actively dying, there is no good  reason a doctor would  withhold medications to ease this process.

Hospice is a good thing :-). People are often scared to take that step to put someone on hospice but they do some great work

I am 24 and have been a nurse for a year on a medical floor. The link phoebe posted makes me sad reading what people have written. Yes, nursing IS hard and sometimes thankless and sometime not fun, but I can say I love being a nurse. 

I got my BSN right out of high school (did spend a year doing pharmacy pre-reqs before I went to the nursing program). 

Now that I am year into the job, I am a lot more confident in doing the job and am now getting more involved outside of just caring for patients- I am part of a team/program to reduce C diff infections and also will be a mentor for student nurse interns for the next 2 months.

Feel free to message me also 

you only get to wear your hair in a ponytail once a week. I guess... you chose today.

I do not like black tea, but give me a lemon herbal tea any day.... especially with lemongrass and rose hips in it! yum :-)

Passionfruit tea is also pretty good... I have not had it in a while as I cannot find loose leaf passion fruit tea and I don't have a "tea ball" either

In addition to the Vitamin C, you can also try echinacea and zinc (I used to take them in lozenge form). Always seemed to prevent and shorten colds for me :-)

i think this should be part of the standard materials provided to patients in the hospital so night shift workers could have a bit of a break! it's 3 am... why are you still awake???!!? argh

Ugh Christmas presents. The problem comes in with hubby's family. We just graduate college and got married, so right now our life is debt. Last thing we want to do is drop a couple hundred dollars on gifts. His family does a draw of adult names and then every child is supposed to get a gift- these include my hubb's cousins. I don't know any adult who buys presents for their cousins. So we will not be doing that. Of course, that put's hubby's sister in a rage because she does even though she doesn't have a lot of money. Too bad... we are not getting suckered into that one. ANd in addition to gifts you have to contribute items to fill up large-child size stocking per person. I hate this because they are full of  little items of crap that I just throw away- aaahhh such a waste of money!

We also live 2 states away from his fam, but 2 weekends in a row in December we have to go celebrate with them. Wish they could actually enjoy our company rather than worrying about presents.

The only people I REALLY want to buy gifts for are my hubby and sister.

I was thinking Salem's lot, and when I opened the list, #1.

I did read it when I was in my teens, but it was one of those books (at least for me) that if I was reading it at night I was too scared to look out the windows into the dark.

I went horseback riding in one of our state parks. the weather was perfect and the woods were absolutely beautiful. Saw a bunch of deer on the ride too. :-)