ARR 1988 - Flipbook - Page 127
DIC: Home
For some time my working days have been spent studying Doctor's
Orders, counting out pills, pouring measured liquids into little brown bottles
and injecting various drugs into small plastic bags of solution known as
"piggy-backs," which will then be injected over a period of time into someone
who is very ill. At first I enjoyed the tangible rewards, and each "Discharge:
Home" was like a warm sip of coffee on a sub-zero January afternoon. But
it doesn't take long to realize that though the order for Mrs. Smith may come
through reading "D/C: Home," ward two, bed four, is NEVER going to be
empty. So it's not unusual to develop-out of self-defense, perhaps--a sort
ofdetachment that borders criminally on casualness and carelessness. I first
experienced that kind of detachment while doing an internship at the
hospital on Nellis Air Force Base, where I actually came to resent the people
on whose behalf! often worked to exhaustion, yet never saw. However, at
the Wasatch Medical Center, where I have recently been hired, I not only see
the patients I am dispensing for, I also see the results of the pharmacy's role
in medicine. With one patient in particular I began to grasp the subtly
monumental reactions to my work as a pharmacist, and his rapid decline
finally brought home to me the incredible responsibility inherent in that
work for preserving or extinguishing his very young life.
Jason McKenney was all of twelve when he turned up in the Pediatric
Intensive Care Unit, immune system on strike and victim of a pancreatic
disorder that will permanently deprive him of a natural source of lifepreserving insulin. His family, huddled nightly in the brightly lit corridor,
quiet and suppressed, both anticipating and dreading their solitary five
minute visits with the scrawny kid under the banks of blinking, blipping
machines.
I picked up the first Admit Orders at the Nurse's Station, glanced into
his room on my way out; no one was there except a small bundle of blankets
spitting up a mass of wires and tubes, crowned by stray tufts of ginger hair.
I copied his Orders in the medication profiles, and set about making his
antibiotic piggybacks, washing my hands and laying out the drugs and
solutions in the flow hood-an apparatus that forces purified air over an
enclosed work space, thereby producing a fairly sterile environment.
Each day I filled his drug drawer with the prescribed pills and bottles
ofinsulin. Each day I hunched into the flow hood and drew up five cc's of one
medication and ten cc's of another. Each day he got worse. The dosages were
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