Spending the day in Wound Care

It has been a few weeks now that I have been on the Medical/Surgical floor every Wednesday. I have had some good experiences up there and have learned a lot.  A few weeks ago, I was able to stray away from the normal floor and spend a day down in wound care! ! I saw about 10 different patients that day, but I will only bore you with the ones that I enjoyed...

 

The first patient that I saw had a gaping wound on his elbow. They were having a hard time with the patient not reopening the wound, since it was on a part of the body that could easily be reopened. They decided that they would put this person in a full arm in a cast to prevent him from moving it and opening it back up farther. I had never seen a cast be put on before, so this was interesting to me.  I was able to stand next to the Doctor and hold the bucket of water for him to dip the dressings into. 

The Nurse then asked me to get the vitals for the patient next door. This patient had a quarter size ulcer on their sacrum and 4 small ulcers on the back heels. The Doctor came in and told me that the Nurse was going to prep to give this patient a skin graft. She opened a large package packed with dry ice and pulled out this tiny Ziploc bag. She then proceeded to defrost the dermagraft. After the graft was ready and everything was set up, the Doctor started covering the ulcers with the graft. He told me that this graft cost $1200 just for a small piece that was smaller than a 3x5 card.  Because they could not use the graft again on another patient and he had finished with this patient, he let me look and touch the graft. It was really neat! 

The last patient that I saw that afternoon had necrotizing fasciitis on their right leg. It is a flesh eating bacteria, so this patient basically had no skin on the bottom of his right leg! It was covering everywhere from below the knee, to above the ankle.  This was by far the most interesting thing that I had seen that day! I had never seen anything like it before. The Doctor came in and told me about it. The patient’s wound was healing, but not very fast. The Doctor left and the Nurse started to dress the leg up. He was placing a wound vacuum on the leg, so I stayed to watch. It was really neat to see how this was done.

Although seeing all of these patients was fun, I don't think that being a wound care Nurse is the job for me. I am looking forward to my Operating Room rotation in a few weeks!