Need help with case study!

hi, fawnfalls. . .here are two websites that contain links to a whole bunch of case studies done by nursing students so you can get an idea of what a case study looks like, at least the ones done for this nursing program. basically, a case study is a care plan in a text form. in your situation, you are going to use apa format and probably need to include references as well. you probably need to treat this as a seriously as a formal term paper.

http://learn.sdstate.edu/craigg/ercases.html - examples of case studies by student nurses

http://learn.sdstate.edu/craigg/ersp01.html - more examples of case studies by student nurses

http://www.med.umich.edu/nursing/snl/cs2.pdf - this is a case study done by hospital nurse educators to train their nursing staff in how to use nanda nursing diagnoses, noc and nic to put a care plan together. this particular case is for a surgical patient. i have 6 others from this series, but they are for different patient situations.

you can find information about colorectal cancer on the website of the national cancer institute. you can easily link into their website by doing a search for colorectal cancer on medline plus (http://www.medlineplus.gov/). for the pathophysiology of cancer i also have some information that you can use. if you can't find the specific pathophysiology of your patient's cancer, try searching the articles on emedicine (http://www.emedicine.com/) since they often include the pathophysiology of a disease in the early part of every article. you may have to register on the site to pull up articles, but it is free. use their search box and just type in the name of the cancer. other websites where you can find information about cancer are the major cancer treatment centers such as the university of texas m.d. anderson cancer center (http://www.mdanderson.org/patients_public/about_cancer/). i happen to live down the road from another center, not as big as m.d. anderson called city of hope (http://www.cityofhope.org/home.htm). you may have a large cancer treatment center near you that you can go to for information on cancer.

http://www.cancer.gov/

https://allnurses.com/forums/f50/mdmred60-183294.html - you will find an explanation of the pathophysiology of cancer from the prospective of what happens at the cellular level on this thread. however, there is nothing to reference it.

http://www.hhmi.org/annual95/b100.html - cancer and the cell cycle

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/disease/cancer.html - genes and cancer

i encourage you to read the directions you were given for this project carefully and follow the guidelines and instructions. i also suggest that you use the link to the critical thinking flow sheet for nursing students that is at the bottom of this post, open the file and print it out. it will help you in including all the elements you will need for this paper. the idea is that when you are done, you should be a mini-expert on colorectal cancer, what it is, how it happens, a few statistics on it, how it is detected, how it is treated, and most importantly, the part the nurses play. your instructors are most likely going to be judging you on your knowledge of how you apply the nursing process to your patient's situation. so, it will be important you demonstrate that. you will want to list your patient's symptoms and your nursing interventions for them. if you need help with how to determine nursing diagnoses you will find it on these two threads, or you can post a question and i will watch for it:

• https://allnurses.com/forums/f205/desperately-need-help-careplans-170689.html - desperately need help with careplans (in nursing student assistance forum)
  
• https://allnurses.com/forums/f50/careplans-help-please-r-t-aeb-121128-7.html - careplans help please! (with the r\t and aeb) (in general nursing student discussion forum)

have fun!