I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I seem to have a knack for remembering pointless things.
I remember the names of restaurants that I've eaten at on vacations, the servers' names, and other useless information that I will never need to recall in my life again.
This also applies to my time in nursing school, which admittedly wasn't that long ago, but long enough that a lot of the non-vital "nice to know but not need to know" information that we learned has become a little hazy.
The one random nugget of seemingly useless information that I remember from nursing school is what a scleral buckle is and what it is used to treat. It was briefly mentioned in my second semester of nursing school and for some reason it stuck with me. I've never encountered someone that has had this procedure in clinical OR in my personal life and I really have no justification for remembering it, but I do.
Does anyone else care to share a random nugget of information they learned in nursing school that they still remember, but never actually came in handy to know?
I like to turn mittleschmerz into other words like miggleschmertz and schlatzenmigle. It's such a fun word to play off of and my girlfriends that suffer from shirtsNskittles get a kick out of it.
I learned about Pheochromocytomas in A & P class in 1976. The professor painted a vivid image of someone spiraling from a Pheo. He said a lab test (VMA) was used to diagnosis. Always thought that a Vanillylmandelic Acid test was a great name for urine test. It stuck in my head. In 1990, working in ICU, we had a patient that looked like what the professor described. The MD was at the nurses station scratching his head over the patient. I casually suggested he order a VMA test on the urine to check for a a pheo. He laughed, ordered it, and called a surgeon the minute the test came back positive. Best result was after this when I made a suggestion to this MD he always listened!
Specializes in Adult and Pediatric Vascular Access, Paramedic.
I remember doing my pediatric rotation, which i was very excited about because I enjoy caring for kids. I don't have any so I never even thought of this, but our instructor reminded us to always make sure we take all of our trash, since caps and other small items can present as choking hazards.
It may sound stupid of me, but I had never even thought of that before then, and now I always remember to take all my junk and I never put bandaids/4x4 on my missed IV sites for younger kids, I just hold pressure until it stops bleeding and leave it.
It really got drilled into my head about taking your synthroid in the morning, which has apparently proven to be the incorrect way to give it as my hospital system now schedules it for 2100. My brain doesn't like it.
I had a patient with mycobacterium avium complex while I was in school, so when we had to pick a disease to do a research paper/presentation on, I picked that one. What I remember best was how difficult it was to do the research paper because the disease was so rare. I felt like an idiot for not picking diabetes. We had someone with MAC pneumonia in a couple months back - and the person giving me report was telling me about how she wasn't really sure what it was, and I got the opportunity to share what I knew. It's cool when those rare things you remember a lot about from nursing school come forward in real life.
I don't remember much about autonomic dysreflexia from school, but I ended up seeing it a ton in my CNA job while I was in school. I worked on an inpatient rehab floor that took stroke victims, spinal cord injuries, and traumatic brain injuries. It was kind of an unspoken rule that if a spinal cord patient was due for vitals, it was time to cath them and/or disimpact first, so we wouldn't have to be rechecking vitals really often if the patient was experiencing some autonomic dysreflexia.
Reading through this thread makes me grateful for the experiences I've had. I think I have experienced at least 75% of the things described in here as weird things that people have never seen.
I have only seen two Myxedema coma patients in my career; one was a pt that I had as a student. He was nonverbal, immobile with the doughy skin and oafish facies. He had horrific skin breakdown. He was found by firemen who responded to a gas leak otherwise he would have died of neglect.
When we were learning to mix insulins I remember reciting to myself CLOUDY CLEAR CLEAR CLOUDY
meaning inject air into the cloudy, inject air into the clear, draw up the clear, draw up the cloudy. Then my lab instructor burst my bubble when she told me that some modified insulins are clear (like lantus that can't be mixed anyway) so I should learn it as modified unmodified unmodified modified but it didn't have the same ring to it.
I've never even had to mix insulins outside of nursing school.
beachtomountainsRN
5 Posts
I like to turn mittleschmerz into other words like miggleschmertz and schlatzenmigle. It's such a fun word to play off of and my girlfriends that suffer from shirtsNskittles get a kick out of it.