Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan

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I began reading this book yesterday, partly the reason for the lack of blog post. The novel is a self-written case-study of Susannah Cahalan's "month of madness" in which she succumbs to an illness unknown by many healthcare professionals. Fortunately for Cahalan, a doctor on her team of practitioners was familiar with a contemporary study that identified the cause of a certain set of symptoms in young women.

Cahalan describes her symptoms as she lived through them. Although she does not remember much about her experience in total, she combines snippets of memories with extensive research into her case. She relies on several friends, family members, and healthcare providers' recollections and documents recorded during her period of illness to fill in the gaps. The result is a tale of determined young woman battling an illness that nearly claimed her life.

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As much as I want to go into details about the novel, I will leave it up to the discretion of the reader. It can be heartbreaking and hard at times to read, but it is well worth the time spent on it. I will, however, discuss a detail Cahalan writes about her neurologist. In discussing her case with the neurologist, he states he is unfamiliar with her diagnosis - despite it being publicized nearly everywhere in the media and in various journals of medicine for the last few months.

It is a fact that medicine is constantly evolving. Healthcare practitioners are (and rightly so) expected to follow the latest developments in medicine. Not only should healthcare providers be up-to-date with contemporary practices, they should understand them as well. Without understanding the developments, healthcare practitioners increase the risk of misdiagnosing their patients and decrease the level of care they provide.

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Although healthcare practitioners are required to continue their education, the most valuable practitioners will be the ones who actively seek to learn despite the various time and energy constraints all healthcare practitioners face. Ultimately, the importance of a doctor lies in their knowledge of medicine and humanity than their academic achievements.

Intensive Care by Echo Heron

There is so much I can say about this novel, but for the sake of time and to entice more readers I will only speak to a few main points I took from it.

One of the first things I would like to point out is that Echo was a mother while also going through nursing school. She raised her child to the best of her ability and did have some "real-life" events that threw her off her guard at points. The fact that she included these life events in her book as well really influenced my perspective of her as a nurse and her as an author. 

It truly is easy to become swept up in the grandeur of medicine and forget about the bad days, hard decisions, and inevitable consequences of others' decisions. Intensive Care is a great reminder of the challenges nurses face. It is also a gleaming example of all that is important about nursing. The compassion Echo shows her clients is incredible! I think every nurse strives to provide the best care for their patients and the stories Echo shares are only a few examples of the ways we can do so.

That being said, I encourage all healthcare providers and families of healthcare providers to read this in order to gain a deeper insight into one woman's perspective of the healthcare industry. It hopefully will gain us nursing students some compassion and nurses a little more respect than frequently experienced.

Nursing Diagnosis

Earlier this morning my friend and I were discussing other majors we would be if we could be more than one major. The self-imposed limit was four, so I chose five:

1. Athletic training
2. Anthropology
3. Psychology
4. Creative Writing
5. Microbiology

Sitting in the fading light of the afternoon helped me contemplate why I was not a double major. There were the obvious reasons (financial, temporal, etc.), but I kept returning to a thought I have had more and more frequently - there is too much to know. With whatever subject topic, there is literally too much to know. 

For instance, before I reflected on the previously mentioned conversation I was becoming increasingly overwhelmed with the amount of work I had to accomplish before the weekend. Added to the stress, I also felt the pressure of having to complete a major health requirement for clinical when I did not have the adequate level of health literacy to do so. (I'll talk about health literacy tomorrow. Point being, my anxiety level was high.) I could not imagine completing and being able to properly understand it all. There was too much to learn! 

My dilemma reminded me of a book I read over the summer called Too Big To Know which discussed the difficult topic of knowledge. It was a bit of a tough read conceptually, but it flowed well. I definitely recommend it for intellectual stimulation. Anyway, it talked about how knowledge has more depth now than ever before because of the increasing amount of knowledge available world-wide. It is actually rather mind-blowing. The book made it a point to reassure its readers that no matter how many books, articles, webpages, so on and so forth one reads, one will never be a know-it-all. As weird as it sounds, thinking about the book and all that it had to say calmed me and helped me focus on the tasks at hand. 

Oh the strange things I think about...