Friday, March 4, 2011

Make no mistake, we are clinical....

You know as well as I do that I have had my doubts about our profession. The stories are the same throughout the profession, but today, today was different. I have been looking for ways to assert myself in my new job. I have volunteered to head up the investigational medication process; showed interest in learning how to manage VTE patients; and have just considered many other ways to take on more responsibility, while planning on how to get started. All that being said, I have still mostly been doing order verification. Until today...

Our ID physician is not with us at the moment, and we were given a heads up about this toward the end of the day. Basically we were told that we need to be proactive in antibiotic stewardship, of course I got excited and was looking forward to this opportunity. Little did I know that 2 hours later one of the physician's nurses would be calling for a consult. I don't know that I was completely ready, but I tried to handle it professionally with out freaking out.

I say freaking out, because it wasn't like they called and said "hey this person has an upper respiratory infection, what is gonna be the best option." Instead, this person had a UTI consisting of a postive culture for pseudomonas, that was none-the-less resistant to everything but gentamicin and tobra. This caused my mind to race. All of the red flags and warnings popped into my head about ototoxicity and nephrotoxicity, and the six step dose adjustments, so I had to tell the nurse that I would get back with her.

The other pharmacist and I put our heads together, gathered the information, and made our recommendation. Which I feel is pretty sound. Pretty exciting actually. So, today, I feel like a Doctor of Pharmacy.

Soooooo, In your face old friend who always trying to belittle me even though I went to school for a long time and I try to be cool with you everytime I hang out, but you still want to prove your better than me for some reason.

----- Sorry, had to get that out there.

No comments:

Post a Comment