‘Duh’ Moments
In class we have come to a point where we are starting to make the connections between the basic courses that we took last year. A lot of the things that we are going over in class are expanding on our prior knowledge and becoming more applicable to the things that we examine in others, as well as ourselves. Which is ultimately what is supposed to happen-even though I occasionally have a "Duh, I should have known that moment."
For example, today in class we worked on incremental stages for exercise testing. Before the test started we had to collect data such as HR, BP, RR, O2 saturation, etc. When one of my partners took my BP, it was much higher than normal, so another partner took it (thinking that the other may have done it incorrectly) and got relatively the same reading. I could not figure out for the life of me why my BP was so high. Now my BP does occasionally increase when I am sick (which can be expected), but I was perfectly fine today.
My "duh" moment came later on in the day when I remembered that a prior to my exercise test I took my inhaler (I have asthma) which happens to be a sympathomimetic, so naturally I would experience an unusual increase in my BP, especially considering that it is not a medication that I take regularly. This experience "hit" me and made me realize the true significance in why it is so important to take and maintain knowledge of the patient's history of medications and supplements used, as well as vitals at a bare minimum of first evaluation, when health status changes no matter what the clinical setting is and especially when you have a patient exercise.
It is also very important to have a general knowledge of the interactions that medications will have on their vitals. If one does not take these things into consideration when assessing a patient then it becomes very easy to make incorrect assumptions about one's health status or one's skills-as we did today when we thought that that my hypertensive state was due to stress or idiopathic and that my group member had to have made a mistake in her reading.