Proposal Paper Research..HEP!

Nursing Students Student Assist

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Hi All,

I am currently in my third semester of nursing school, one more to go until I have my Associates. Anyways, I have to write a proposal paper this semester based off of a topic that has two sides to it. Sort of like a argumentative paper I suppose.

The topic I chose to write on is pain managment and over sedation of patients with pain medications. I had a 75 yr old patient who had a Thoracotomy for lung cancer that grew into his chest wall. To make a long story short, he kept telling us his pain was a 15 so he kept getting more and more pain medications. I saw him Tuesday and he was doing relatively well, overnight they gave him quite a bit of pain medication and didn't have him out of bed. His lungs started to fill with fluids from not getting up and being oversedated. He wasn't deep breathing and coughing. He was doing really awful when I saw him wednesday, but he was sleeping and not using his dilaudid PCA. He was very obviously comfortable. He kept telling us his pain was a 15, but I had a conversation with his daughter and she said that he was saying his pain was higher then it really was because he was afraid of ending up with pain. Anyways, regardless of all of this evidence that he wasn't really in pain and was just afraid of it, the doctor ordered for us to give him methadone. I refused to give it knowing that if he was sedated further, he was going to die. My instructor gave him 12 hours to live. Anyways, he ended up living because a pulmonologist came and agreed with what I said. Stop oversedating him, get him up to cough, deep breath and use his IS.

So my question is, A patients pain is what they say it is, but where do we draw the line? I am just struggling finding articles that I can use for my paper. Does anyone have any ideas of where I can go to get nursing journal articles? Anything that would support or not support the topic? Thanks!!!

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