mianlica

I have assisted with many bone marrow biopsies and have rarely seen patients extremely uncomfortable. If you're very anxious, ativan will help. Also be assertive and ask the practitioner to be very generous with the lidocaine. The lidocaine does burn at first but once it gets in there the burning shouldn't continue. Everyone reacts differently but I can honestly say that the majority of the patients tolerate it very well. Good luck with the procedure and I pray the biopsy turns out negative for you.

I studied by using the online Oncology Nursing Review at http://www.meniscus.com. It has questions developed by ONS. It's all I used to study. I loved it. If you register with the website they also send you free CEU activities in periodically. You'll need the oncology hours when it comes time to re-certify.

We have them on our unit. I like them. The call light automatically goes out when you enter the room so you don't have to crawl over the bed, chairs, tables, etc... to turn it off. I can go to the computer screen to see where all of my co-workers are. I hate walking around the unit looking for someone when they have a phone call or I have to ask them a question. These tracking tags help us work more efficiently, cuts down on steps and yelling someone's name to find them.

I started nursing school at 32 with 4 kids under 6 at home. I'm now 45 and finishing my MSN. You're never too old!

Try here. There's patient and professional information. http://www.cancersource.com/

On our unit the pre-meds vary by patient. We usually offer ativan and dilaudid or morphine ahead of time. One of our practitioners that I've assisted several times makes sure that the patient is very well numbed. She takes a good 5 minutes to inject lidocaine at the site and on the bone. My personal experience with lidocaine as a patient for other procedures has been pretty uncomfortable and one of my docs buffers it with bicarb first to cut down on the initial sting. Distraction is also very important. Idle conversation helps, and only talk about the procedure to assess comfort level or to warn of the possibility of increased discomfort.

My opinion is, if you have any type of growth that doesn't belong there, get a biopsy, ultrasound or other appropriate diagnostic test right away. No one can tell you by visualization or palpation with 100% accuracy that it's not cancer. Just find out and put your mind at rest.

Abraxane is a newly approved chemo drug for breast cancer. It's a protein bound form of paclitaxel which touts much less severe side effects than the original paclitaxel. Paclitaxel is also a first line treatment in ovarian cancer so it makes sense that Abraxane could be used for ovarian cancer. A wonderful site for patient information is the Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center site (mskcc.com). It has all kinds of information on each type of cancer and the treatment that is generally used. Good luck to you.

I think the first thing you should look for is a hospital with an excellent residency program for new graduates. In Connecticut I've seen programs that go from 6 weeks to 6 months (the longer, the better). That said, I started on a medical oncology floor with a mix of oncology and non-oncology patients. It had enough variety of med/surg patients to give me a good base but there was also enough oncology patients to get my feet wet with the more complicated cases. It's very difficult to give you a straight yes or no answer because it primarily depends on the unit and what type of support they'll give you as you start your career. Where I work now, a new grad would drown, because we just don't have the program or resources in place to properly orient new grads.

I recently had a sickle cell patient that needed an exchange transfusion. We draw off 300cc of blood, give a NS bolus, then draw another 300cc of blood and then transfuse 2 units of PRBC's. Because this patient's access is so poor he has a port. We attempted to draw the blood off his port and after about 280cc of the first cycle, the port clotted. We successfully restored the port using urokinase, but after only 100cc of the next cycle the port clotted again. During both cycles I flushed after every 50cc or so. Does anyone have any ideas to make this more successful next time or is it even appropriate to do this procedure with a port? Thanks in advance for any suggestions!