Heavy Lifting Required

The phrase "heavy lifting involved" does not adequately sum up my day.

Patient #1:
Okay, so no, my patient was not wearing a Santa suit, but they were about this size... They have a BMI of 58. The surgeon had to order a special table that cost over $58,000 to perform the surgery, and they wanted ME to get them out of bed post-operatively!! EEK! Fortunately, the occupational therapist assigned to this patient is a strong guy, so between the two of us, we were able to sit at the edge of bed for about 10 minutes.


Patient #2: Okay so my first patient of the afternoon was a patient who had a total hip replacement over 10 months ago and in the last 10 months has dislocated their hip over 8 times... There is only so many times a surgeon can put the hip back in and revise a total hip replacement. So the only alternative is a spica cast. A spica cast is a cast that is put from the mid-abdomen all the way down to just above the knees so a patient's hips can't move. So imagine this cast: On a 60-something-year-old. And they asked ME to get the patient up! So I again teamed up with an occupational therapist to figure out how to get a patient, who can only bend about 25 degrees at the waist and has both their hips totally immobilized, out of bed. We decided that the best way to accomplish this was to just turn the patient so their legs were hanging off then leverage the patient up into standing. It was a little scary I'll admit. I slid the patient off the bed from essentially a laying down position and leveraged them into standing. Fortunately, the patient has a great sense of humor and we laughed all the way through the treatment. Especially when the patient referenced the surgeon as "the butcher".

My third tough patient of the day was a completely dependent transfer x 2 people. It's a really sad case of chemotherapy gone bad for a young patient with 2 small children. This patient can do nothing, and is not consistently responding to questions with blinks or hand squeezes. My days can never seem bad, when I have a patient who's greatest accomplishment of the day is coughing up a huge blob of sputum out of their trach when I have them sitting edge of bed for 3 minutes.

That's my day in a nutshell. 9 hours. I'm tired.