Blood Pressure and Parking Issues… What a Week!

Here at BJD we have a new course called “Standardized Patient Assessment Laboratory I”. It’s not a brand new course, but really a merging of two courses that were previously taught. In this lab we practice writing SOAP notes and learn new assessment skills. This week the skill we were working on was blood pressure. Now my past experiences at taking someone’s blood pressure has always been to hook up the patient to an automatic machine that pretty much did everything for me as long as the cuff was properly placed on the patient’s arm. In this class though the professors expected us to be less reliant on technology (for once) and to take the blood pressure with a stethoscope and a syphgmomanometer (don’t ask me to pronounce that).

I was kind of excited about this because it would be my first chance to legitimately use my brand new stethoscope that had been sitting in my closet for a while. So when it came time to actually take the blood pressure I executed the overall technique quite well, but for one hitch…I couldn’t actually hear the blood rushing back into the blood vessels when I was releasing the pressure from the cuff. Unfortunately that is not a minor detail, since without actually hearing the necessary sounds, even if I do everything else completely correctly, it won’t matter. So my poor partner had her blood pressure taken more than once, while each time I earnestly listened for the “thud” sound that I was supposed to hear. That is definitely a skill that I will be getting more practice in. So if you see me walking around with a stethoscope and a syphgmomanometer, you have been warned.

For another one of my courses, “Leadership by Design”, I am required to answer three questions on a daily basis. One of them is “What surprised me today?” Some days I honestly don’t have anything to say. Well on Tuesday I had something to write: cars in the parking lot were being ticketed in what I think is the first time I ever remember any cars being ticketed here at BJD. The level of upset and surprise was evident on people’s immediate Facebook status updates. Cars without a Shenandoah University (SU) parking permit were being ticketed and unfortunately that was a great deal of cars. One of the reasons that not everyone bought a parking permit is that our pharmacy school is located on a different side of town than the main campus, so they didn’t see a need to buy a parking permit since we don’t really use the main campus parking lots. Unfortunately this is an example of a disconnect that exists between main campus and the Health Professions Building (HPB), where not only the pharmacy school is located but also other health related majors too. Our location is close to Winchester Medical Center (WMC) which not only for us students is an ideal location, but also for the faculty whose practice sites are the WMC. On the other hand it has the drawback of being detached from the main campus.

Last but not least I wanted to mention the departure of one of the best professors I have had thus far at BJD, Dr. Phipps. In my P2 year he taught Pharmacology and a course called ICARE: Cardiology (a therapeutics and pharmacology course about diseases related to the cardiovascular system). At first it took a while to get used to his teaching style since he didn’t rely on PowerPoint presentations the way many other professors here at BJD do. But once I got used to that I really felt like I was learning a great deal from him. What I think made him a good professor was not only his skill at conveying his knowledge of pharmacology and cardiovascular issues but his fairness as well. He did his best to stay true to whatever promises he made. This week we had our last lecture with him in another course. Next week he will be leaving BJD to join the faculty at another university, their gain is our loss.