Recently, I was caring for a patient diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. He was a young man with tattoos and a muscular frame whose strong body was just beginning to fail him. In the course of making my hourly rounds I asked if there was anything he needed that I could provide for him. "I wish you could just tell me I won't die."
It doesn’t take any longer to eat healthy food, but it does take extra planning and time to prepare healthy meals. Over the years I have come up with some time-saving tips and tools that I think you will appreciate.
Since its pivotal report in 2001, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has advocated for improving the quality of U.S. health care. To that effect, the IOM’s latest report outlines a systematic plan to help the U.S. healthcare system meet that goal.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to trametinib (Mekinist tablets, GlaxoSmithKline, LLC) and dabrafenib (Tafinlar capsules, GlaxoSmithKline, LLC) for use in combination in the treatment of patients with unresectable or metastatic melanoma with a BRAF V600E or V600K mutation as detected by an FDA-approved test.
A fender bender caused her to get the CT scan that showed a temporal lobe mass. Looks like a glioblastoma the oncologist said somberly. She knew more than enough to understand the magnitude of what she had been told. She was a medical professional—her role was to help people who were having a difficult time after being diagnosed with cancer—she helped them die, but she also helped them live before death.
Type I and type II errors are instrumental for the understanding of hypothesis testing in a clinical research scenario. A type I error is when a researcher rejects the null hypothesis that is actually true in reality.
It is guaranteed that as an oncology nurse each one of us has encountered a patient at the end of his or her life. Despite the medical advances in cancer prevention and screening, sometimes there are no more ways to fight the disease.
I was reading through the program of my granddaughter's dance recital and noticed that there was not a single common name in the first three groups of young dancers. It was as if their parents purposefully decided to come up with the most unique names possible. This is not the case with the family names of targeted cancer drugs.
Jackie is administering six units of pooled random donor platelets to Stuart, a patient with myelodysplastic syndrome. The transfusion was started at 120 ml per hour, per hospital policy. When Jackie rechecked Stuart’s vital signs at 15 minutes, she noted that his temperature had increased from 37.1°C to 38.1°C. In addition, Stuart was chilling. What would you do?
