Trauma

I appear to be the cure for constipation. It seems that every time I walk into someone’s room this week to talk to him or her, the person is on the bedpan.

I’ve been seeing a mix of respiratory patients and trauma/rehab patients this week. The respiratory patients are mostly 20+ year olds with CF. They are kind of a wild bunch. My RD is about the same age as most of her CF patients and she sees them often, so she has great rapport with them. According to her, many of them get married and/or have kids really young, which I guess makes sense knowing that they have a life expectancy of 37 years. I learned that CF patients aren’t supposed to share hospital rooms or even come in contact with each other because they are so prone to sharing infections. This means that support groups are difficult and are usually by phone or online. It was really sad today to realize that 2 of our CF patients of the same age--who know each other and are in adjacent rooms--can’t even hang out while they get through this latest bout with an infection.

Question for the group--has anyone read/learned about CF-related diabetes? Its supposed to be an odd type of diabetes that is a bit of a mix between types I and II, and one of our patients has it, but I don’t really understand it…so any references you’ve encountered would be helpful!

The other patients we’ve been seeing are trauma patients. It’s a mix of the sad (21-year-old mom left seriously impaired after a MVC), the mysterious (45 year old male drug addict found with head trauma after an assault who had a blue teddy bear on his bed today), and even the morbidly funny (tree cutter who fell out of an 80 foot tree with an 85 foot safety rope). It is troubling me this week to see how random these life-altering events can be for some people. But it also is frustrating to see so many people mess up their own lives really badly by doing stupid things like driving (or climbing trees) while drunk or stoned.