Preparing for serious situations and fighting breast cancer

Well I know it’s been a while since my last blog post so before it gets any later I guess it’s time for an update of what P3 year has been like so far. Last time I wrote about being in the middle of midterms. Right now is a nice time in the school year, where we don’t have any immediate exams so my days are not all about studying for an upcoming midterm. With that said though, it would be naïve to think that even though there is not an imminent exam I can completely ignore schoolwork. I still have to study new material as it is being taught and not leave it to day long cram sessions before the exam, otherwise I would be setting myself up to do poorly.

Thankfully after all the intense mid-term studying we had Fall Break, where we have a Monday and Tuesday off. Some people spend this time just catching up on sleep and life, others like me travel to other places leaving all thoughts of pharmacy school behind for a little while. I went up to visit friends in Minnesota, which although it was colder than expected (they had snow even with their trees’ leaves still being green) I had a good time nonetheless. On the way back from Minnesota I witnessed an interesting and intense situation.

My flight out of Minnesota was bright and early at 7 am. Getting there proved to be a little difficult since there was an accident on the main road to the airport, but after all my rushing and running I made it onto the plane in the nick of time. As the plane was taxiing down the runway to take off the lady in front of me started to tap an elderly woman sitting next to her to wake her up. However the elderly woman was not responding, the younger woman even called out her name several times but the woman would not come to. Then the younger woman was calling for help with a panic in her voice that I have rarely heard before. The flight attendants rushed over and the younger woman explained that she felt the elderly woman all the sudden shake and then go unconscious and how the elderly woman was unable to wake-up. So the flight attendants immediately asked if there was a doctor or nurse on board and thankfully there was. The nurse came over from her seat and saw that the lady had a pulse and was breathing. By now the pilot had been contacted and asked to return to the gate so that paramedics could come on board. At one point the elderly lady did regain consciousness and when she was asked if she knew where she was she did respond “airplane”. But when the paramedics were transferring her to a wheelchair, she lost consciousness a second time. This experience taught me that one should be confident in the first aid training and CPR techniques that one is taught. In situations like mine it may be possible that there is no nurse or physician around to help and someone else may need to step in. Pharmacists should be prepared not just for routine patient encounters but also urgent encounters such as this one.

Later on this past week I helped fellow pharmacy students with their training for the real world. In an effort to better prepare pharmacists for encountering patients first year pharmacy students take part in a patient counseling assessment as part of a communications course. They are told to look-up information about a certain drug, such as: route of administration, frequency of dosage, indication, side effects, storage, etc. One of the organizations that I am a part of, Rho Chi, had practice patient counseling sessions with the first year students. From my previous experience I know that with practice people become more confident and thus do better on the actual patient counseling assessment, which is why we decided to offer such a service to the first year students. I firmly believe that in order to improve pharmacy as a profession we need to help one another be better individual pharmacists and this was one way to do so.

Last but not least this short week ended with Kappa Epsilon’s Annual Breast Cancer Awareness Month Dinner. This is a dinner where we raise funds to donate to a breast cancer charity. We also had a breast cancer survivor come and speak about her experience. Many people work hard to put this event together as was evident by the decorations and coordination present. Breast cancer is a platform issue for Kappa Epsilon, so not only do we have this dinner but we also sell t-shirts. At health fairs we even provide informative pamphlets about breast cancer and the proper way to conduct a self-exam and other facts to be aware of in regards to breast cancer. I think the dinner turned out quite well. I even left with a free vase of lovely flowers.