Dog-associated house dust protects against respiratory infection linked to asthma

As a dog lover, pediatric RN in a home with a kid and furry German Shepherd this is fascinating to me!!

Dog-associated house dust protects against respiratory infection linked to asthma

Beauty and Competence

Such serious, caring eyes...

The Balancing Act

 Helping My Patient Die Loved

Ruth, with the left side of her face hanging slack like an empty pillow case, weakly nods she wants a drop of water on her cracked and useless tongue. Carefully, just a dropper-full, but I worry she can’t swallow. Seeing my fear, she finds some humor to mock her end and mumbles “It must be hot where I’m going!”

I doubt there’s space in hell for her; can’t my tears squelch its licking flames?

She’s had a stroke, come to me to die. I have only been an RN a few months and have never seen the dead; my nursing knowledge came from books.

I clasp her hand and nervously try to smooth wrinkled, papery skin. I want to hold her more securely on her tightrope, not let her drop into the deep. In my discomfort I say “My grandmother’s name is Ruth, too.”

“I always hated it,” she barely manages to reply.

My gramma felt the same and she'd ask “Why couldn’t I be a Marie?” Marie is a tender glissando across the tongue, a curling treble cleff, unlike the spitball that is Ruth.

With droppers-full to measure out the cooling water and long, lonely night, I tried to hold tautly onto her fraying ends; but, by morning the balancing-act was over for this Ruth so like my grandmother.

Kissing

Yesterday I kissed my patient. I have been a nurse for almost 18 years and it was a first for me. I do believe in the power of touch and I have held many a hand and wiped both dead and feverish brows, but never had I kissed a patient. I am not a touchy-feely kind of girl and I strongly believe in the "professional presentation" of nursing. But yesterday, I kissed an 87 year old man on the forehead. It wasn't his birthday and he wasn't dying, but he had been asking me to kiss him every day for a week and giving me the most beautiful smile whenever I would bathe him, turn him to prevent pressure ulcers, or give him his sickly pink paste of medicines crushed into applesauce. Then, after a week of his not being able to safely eat from dysphagia that would promptly deposit most foods into his lungs, I assisted a surgeon in bridling him with red robinson catheters.  Through each nare we twisted those large tubes that then were pulled out his mouth, sutured together, clipped short, and turned around to form a red rubber ring. To this a Keofeed tube could be tied that he would never be able to pull out. He cried and coughed, turned blue and batted at us, but there was no family to help us decide what to do and he had been SO hungry all week. I had been the one to passionately tell the doctors that we must somehow feed this man and, so, a surgeon who wasn't even on the case heard me from his dictation desk and volunteered to bridle my patient.

After the procedure, after I had put away the unused sutures and kelly clamps, the patient looked at me and managed to smile again. At me, the nurse who had initiated this procedure that turned a lovely gentleman into a bull. All I could do WAS kiss him.