Fire drills and MBSS

Yesterday was an action-packed day for me. In the morning, while I was in the Rehab hospital working with my dietitian, a hospital Safety Officer pulled me out of the room and had me pull the fire alarm. Then, as the fire doors closed and the alarm started going off , she asked me what I would do if it were a real fire and how I would exit. (During all of this the other staff members were mostly either standing around or going about their business. Fire drills have apparently become quite commonplace over the last few months). Then she quizzed me on the acronyms RAFT and PASS. My dietitian helpfully pointed out that I could check the back of my ID for the letters I was unsure about. In the end, I passed. I was glad I did not bring dishonor to my department.

I also got to see an MBSS yesterday, which was really cool. The patient did very well and will now be able to stop TFs and switch to a regular diet. He was very pleased. Today, we did the consult to switch him to the regular diet. So it was nice to see things have a happy ending, especially since we had to switch another patient on that floor from a po diet to full tube feedings. We'd been tracking him last week, adding supplements and doing a calorie count in order to get him off of the nighttime supplemental TFs he was getting. He did really well, so we switched him to a full po diet, but today they did an MBSS (because they wanted to upgrade him from nectar-thick to thin liquids) and it turns out he was (silently) aspirating everything--fluids of all thicknesses, solids, you name it. So now they have to switch him to a completely npo diet. That was sad.

Tomorrow I start my next rotation-- women's health and cardiology. The women's hospital is really nice and the bathrooms are much nicer than the ones in the rest of the hospital (esp. the one in the basement where the diet office and kitchen are) so I'm looking forward to that.