Friday, December 19, 2008

Cardiovascular Step Down!!!!

(image from the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Association)

I just found out my clinical floor for next semester -- yea! Cardiovascular Step-Down!!!!

That's exciting because, as I've talked briefly about before, I have a heart problem known as "Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy" -- HCM, for short -- which was first described to me as the symptom described as Left Ventricular Hypertrophy -- LVH, which I thought was a disease for a long time until I started in nursing school and they were like "no" and then I started asking better questions. (If you look at the picture above, my heart is kinda like the picture on the right... note the blockage of the aorta? If I ever pass out, please don't grab the AED... thank you, Urban Active ... LOL)

I'm working on a post about it and how it affects my life.

Anyways, the point of this post is just to share my excitement -- I GET TO WORK ON THE HEART FLOOR!!!! :-) I get to learn about the HEART!

...unlike the freakin' orthopedic floor I was on last semester... if I had to give another 90 year old with dementia but with a full hip replacement another full bed bath, I was going to scream.

Bless the souls of the people that can do that.

(Plus I get to learn about a lot of really cool diseases of the heart -- cardiovascular diseases tend to be very hard to conceptualize because there are so many variations on a theme. CV diseases have such wild side affects and affect such a huge segment of the population ... and a blockage in the aorta has such different affects than one in a radial artery... anyways... I'm just really siked :-))

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