Nursing Comments

Good morning all!  By way of introduction, my name is Stephanie Shore Jewett, a proud nursing graduate of Mercy Medical Center (class of 1977), a registered nurse with Mercy for over 20 years, a mother of two great sons, ages 17 and 25 AND a new grandmother to Anson Jewett, age 5 months. Further, I am the great grand-daughter of F.E.V. Shore, the 4^th Chief of Staff of Mercy, who was also instrumental in bringing Mercy to Des Moines, Iowa.  Both my grandfather, Gerald A. Jewett, Sr. and my father, Gerald A. Jewett, Jr. have been very active in serving on several of the Read more…

        Diplopia is a very strange sensation! Commonly referred to as double vision, diplopia can actually have many causes.  It can be due to a diverse range of infectious, neurological, autoimmune, ophthalmologic and neoplastic causes.  Most of these include damage to the third, fourth or sixth cranial nerves (those which control eye movements), cancer, trauma, MS, botulism, Guillain-Barre syndrome, drunkenness, sinusitis, brain tumor abscess, orbital myositis, Read more…

       There are numerous cardiac arrhythmias, but the most common is called atrial fibrillation, A-fib for short.  Any arrhythmia simply means you have an abnormal heart rate.  Approximately 0.4% of the population, increasing with age, will develop this cardiac problem.  It appears that A-fib involves an interplay between electrical triggering events and the myocardial substrate that permits propagation and maintenance of the aberrant electrical circuit.  The most popular focal trigger of A-fib is located between the cardiac muscle that extends into the pulmonary veins.

       Today atrial fibrillation accounts for 1/3 of the hospitalizations for cardiac rhythm disturbances.  The most common symptoms include Read more…

I just returned from a week of training in Las Vegas and I am happy to report all went well; I’ve found the perfect match with a GREAT company.  If you are a registered nurse with utilization review experience, I’ve got the best dream job you can imagine!  You MUST use my name (Stephanie Jewett, RN, MBA) as the person that referred you; this company Read more…

I was getting my son’s physical for school the other day and the doctor talked to us about HPV.  What is it?  HPV, or humanpapilloma virus, is a very common sexually transmitted virus.  In fact, it is the most common sexually transmitted virus in the United States today.  More than half of sexually active men and women are infected with HPV at some time in their lives.  The good news is that there is now Read more…

I was doing some research on clinical trials and it is much more complex than I dreamed!  First of all, any new treatment must go through numerous stages of testing before its benefits and risks can completely be known.  New treatments are discovered in the laboratory and it can take many years of research before they are given to patients.  Why?  Because it is essential to identify that the new treatment is actually better than what is already available.  These research studies are also called clinical trials.  If a treatment has Read more…

          When I was in nursing school, it was very hard for me to differentiate the types of lung sounds.  I guess you can’t just hear rales or rhonchi anytime you want to – you have to wait until the patient and the particular illness presents itself.  To start with the basics, breath sounds are the noises produced by the structures of the lungs during Read more…

This is a guest post by Maria Rainier, a freelance writer and blogger.

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While not heavily studied or well-known, Meniere’s disease can be a debilitating, painful, and dangerous condition of the inner ear.  Named after 19th century French physician Prosper Meniere who studied the inner ear, it is a chronic condition most often found with varying symptoms in people in their 40s and 50s but not unheard of in other age groups, even children.

Maria Rainier

While symptoms may be relieved via various treatment methods, this chronic condition can leave lasting marks on one’s life if left untreated.

Causes and Symptoms

Although physicians don’t know for sure what causes Meniere’s disease, the most obvious hint is the presence of an abnormal volume of fluid in the inner ear. 

In detail, the inner ear is made up of a cluster of cavities and passages appropriately dubbed a Read more…

This is a guest post by Catherine Bynes. Catherine is a career/ educational blogger and she writes mostly about CNA Training and Certification over at her blog.

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Choosing to become a CNA as a career option can be a good choice if you enjoy helping others and want to start an entry-level healthcare position.  If you work as a CNA, you will provide assistance with activities of daily living for patients, monitor vital signs and provide other basic care services for your patients.

A career as a CNA can be a good option if you know you want to work in the medical field, but if you do not want to spend a great deal of time in training.  Most nursing assistant Read more…