Hi Mel

His temp might go down, and he might be just fine.

Court is stressful. I hope tomorrow is the end of this for you.

He might even be able to go to work on Friday if this blows over, if not, I am sure they can cut him some slack for being sick one day.

Don't stress to much...I am just very displeased with the infusion nurses and their chain of command. Sterile handling of IV fluids, IM injections, Sub Q injections, intradermals, all needle, tube type things with the exception of straight caths that some quads do for themselves are sterile...even the straight caths are kept really clean. The only tubes we don't fret about being sterile are GI tubes, because the intestinal system already is colonized with bacteria, usually helpful bacteria. We exist in a truce with bacteria, they help us and we help them, except for the 'insurgent' bacteria...the stuff we do not want.

All organisms, even the friendly stuff, can get the better of us..who amongst us has not had yeast (candida or monililia)?

I think your profession choice was a good one. You are highly organized and can probably type at the speed of light. Being a nurse might have driven you over the edge with worry about your patients. Given your devotion to Alan, if you did that with all your patients, you would be exhausted beyond belief.

I am just very irritated that the cardinal rules of nursing science were broken. This is not high tech, but the very basics, ABCs of good nursing care. I understand the cost of the medicine, but that does not justify risking an organism getting into a patient's bloodstream. Not counting the patient's suffering and risk, it is not cost effective if the patient gets sepsis.

People do not understand that health care, despite being labelled 'non-profit' is not really non-profit. Nurses bear a huge responsibility, and their salaries are non commensurate with their responsibility, as I PM'd you on what we need to know.

A nurse that administers the wrong medication or wrong dose is held responsible, regardless if the doctor ordered it and the pharmacist prepared it. It doesn't seem fair, but we are the last safety check before it ends up in your body. With an ever increasing amount of pharmaceuticals the job is becoming increasingly more difficult, and medication errors are rising. Systems have not caught up with the problem yet.

Conditions called 'iatrogenic' or treatment caused problems are growing. As people learn about meds, treatments, procedures, they all demand more of the doctors to do them. Some doctors also see $$ in innovative procedures, many of them unproven by time as of yet. When a doc really lays out the pros and cons, and sometimes suggests we do nothing for a while, people get mad and go elsewhere, because they want a cure....and that is not always the best...

Consider that hospitals have many antibiotic resistant 'germs' I think msrd mentioned. As a home care nurse, we cared for MRSA patients at home, and then had to go to other patient's homes. Of course there are precautions we take to avoid getting MRSA or spreading it. There are several strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria. People need to realize that medicine is some science, some art, and some luck.

I don't know why Alan is receiving IVIG. Like I said it can be used to boost immune systems or lower immune response....it is a modulator that helps patients with diseases where an immune process is thought to be the etiology. IVIG is one of the safer blood products, as it is 'washed and filtered' to prevent most common and even uncommon diseases from being spread. I just recently became concerned about Prion diseases, but found that they filtered IVIG for Prion diseases and felt the risk was low.

IVIG is still a form of a blood transfusion in a way.