Unit 2 2nd week (2nd response)

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Unit 1 – As this unit is, as they say, “in the books,” I don’t have any questions about it.

 

Unit 2 – The Muse topic covers brain death. I work as a Registered Respiratory Therapist. It falls to me, and my colleagues, to turn the machine off that does the breathing for a patient on life support, the ventilator, not respirator as you usually hear on TV (gag!). That’s how you know they don’t have a good medical advisor attached to the show. There have been a few times I have been asked to shut off a machine when the therapist caring for the patient wouldn’t due to any number of reasons. For some it is religious reason, some personal. There is no joy in turning a life support device off.

 

In my career, I have shut off more ventilators than I really care to think about. Considering most of my career has been in critical care pediatrics, most of those machines were on children. There is nothing more devastating than the loss of a child. It is heart-wrenching for the family, it is also difficult for those caring for the child. Few healthcare workers ever grow “callous” to the loss of a child. Some will transfer to adult care because they have so much anguish dealing with a child’s death. I always considered that to be my “marker” – when it didn’t bother me to shut off the ventilator on a child, I would be done, I would find another career. For what it’s worth, it still bothers me.

 

Still, some families find it difficult to accept that their loved one is brain dead. This is a life event from which there is no recovery. It is not uncommon for healthcare workers to make the effort to keep the patient “alive” until family members living a distance afar have the opportunity to arrive and say their “Good-byes.” Of course (not sure if I should have sarcasm there or not), the patient doesn’t know they are there but it is vital for family closure and peace (uh, no sarcasm, too serious an issue). It helps begin the grieving process. I don’t think you ever recover from the loss of a loved one, we adjust and accept. My grandparents passed in 1972 and I still miss them. Does it dominate my life and emotions? No, life goes on. If you don’t, you get left behind.

 

Questions for this unit are tough to think about. Few people want to die. Who is ready to die? Death is, after all, a part of life, is it really something to fear? Or do we fear it because we don’t understand it? If we fear death, then we fear life. We are not living our life right if we fear death. If you fear death “because I have so much to do yet” then what are you waiting for? Death will come whether you are ready or not. It’s life, none or few of us get out alive on this earth anyway (depending on your religious beliefs). Our understanding is limited to knowing that the deceased is gone. And for our own death, we know, before we go, that we should have spent more time with those we love and less time at the office.

 

Depending on the cause of brain death, the patient may pass away from whatever caused the injury or from complications of the injury. It is compassion on the part of the family that they allow the patient to pass quietly and not insist on heroic efforts. These are futile efforts but sometimes a family member cannot bring themselves to let the family member go. Healthcare workers see this at times. Eventually, all efforts fail and the patient passes.

 

Unit 3 – Putting together an outline for the Individual Project comprises the first step in writing the paper. It is best if one has already pulled information together for the paper and simply needs to refine it and position it in the paper. I find one of the most difficult parts is ensuring that the information flows gently, naturally, from section to section.

 

 

Unit 4 – The Executive Summary. I actually find this part super fun. This is the hard facts of our paper. Short and sweet. Depending on how far you are on earning your degree, you may have written some of these already. That’s how I know they’re fun.

 

 

Unit 5 – Regarding the competencies developed during this course and Intellipath (I hope others didn’t have the trouble with Intellipath that I had). I love ethics classes. I lived in California for 20 years. During the time I was there, the incident occurred at a hospital in southern California when it was found that a respiratory therapist (yes, my profession) was killing patients. Without going into what most people don’t know or what the “news” told people, one of the “knee-jerk reactions” was that the state required all respiratory therapists to attend an ethics class and pass an exam. I was on a couple of advisory boards for schools of respiratory therapy at the time. We argued against such an action. The state’s position was that it wanted ethical healthcare workers. We argued that, 1) attending a class and passing an exam on ethics does not make a person ethical; 2) the person responsible for the deaths has been dealt with and his actions are extremely rare; 3) it was nothing more than the state finding a way to make us pay more money when we already had the highest license fees of any healthcare profession in the state, including doctors. In short, because we didn’t have much of a force in lobbying, respiratory therapists now have to pay to attend a lecture and pass an exam. And that’s not a one-time deal, it is a regularly recurring class and exam.

 

Ethics is an individual matter. Will you be ethical after this class? If you weren’t before, you probably won’t be after.

 

Individual Project – WOW!!!!! There are a number of the listed topics on which I would like to write my project. I don’t know if it is good or bad that I don’t have the time to write about all of them. So, I must choose one. I don’t know of any specific questions I have at this time regarding the project, well, maybe this one – how badly do we get “zinged” if we go over on the number of pages? I don’t know that I will, but considering the topics, it may take more. Editing pen is ready.

 

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