[GROSS ALERT – BEGIN]
Coughed up some chunks after squeezing the saline mist and clearing my throat. Feels that they are chunks of skin. This the second time this has happened. Talked with a nurse last night and apparently this is normal. Will check with the doctor today. (I did, he has a much better explanation. A coating has grown around the tubes in my lungs, and when I cough some pieces break off. Sometimes a whole section – say one inch long, 1/8 inch in diameter, will break of. The resulting shape is therefore a cylinder.
[GROSS ALERT – END]
A new nurse, Vitas, asked me about the use of Gluconate. Currently I use it two times a day. I started at two times per day, but we had upped it for a couple of days to four times a day. This didn’t seem to do too much and so we went back down. Vitas asked “Did I not feel it harsh?” And I said “Yes, but I’m not sure why because it doesn’t have any alcohol in it.” “Oh yes it does,” he said, and he showed me the contents lists: 11.6% alcohol. The mouthwash Alkalol that I’m also using, has a mere 0.02%, which is negligible in drying. Apparently there is a product similar to Gluconate that does not have the alcohol. Will ask DiCaprio what it is. I think that one of the reasons that I did not think that Gluconate had any alcohol in it was because I have a similar product back home, prescribed by my tooth extraction surgeon, and I know that doesn’t have any alcohol. Two system safety issues here:
- Moving nursing staff around can be a good thing, because, even though they may not know the patient that well, they can pick up on things that previous nurses missed.
- Always read the contents label on the bottle, to make sure you’re not getting something that you don’t want.
I heard Vitas and Rose and someone else talking about recording the temps in my case, and how they should measure and how often. Did not hear the decision, but it sounded as if there was some rank being pulled. From a safety angle, this is the classic team-building problem of pulling or deferring to rank, plus this team also has a high degree of changeover. There is, in fact, a measure that you can use to measure how a team is working. The problem is similar to that of crew resource management in the FAA. You can read more about this at Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory.
Had another conversation with Vitas, the nurse who has my case tonight. He’s on staff, but there are contract staff too. He’s been a nurse for only a few years, and before that he was a Pinkerton. He left because he was being asked to do things that he was not comfortable with. He said I would be surprised as what is legal. I said I wouldn’t because I was a member of a jury a couple of years ago, and had seen a detective being interviewed on the stand describe some of the things that he did, such as snapping pictures of the plaintiff’s daughter filling up with gas