Thumb-Tastic!

OK, I know that I’ve been obsessing lately about the current events in our country and the politics of it all.  It is hard for me to divert when I feel that the whole world is going to heck in a hand basket and the cause is so clear.  Well, I’ll try to divert to Nursing, or Humor or something a little more light for a few days just to keep from being too glum.  With all that said, here you go…

When I was a kid, we played baseball and went fishing, went exploring in the swamp… you know, “outdoorsy” kind of stuff.  I never knew Playstation until I was about forty, so I really don’t get the fascination with video games like the current generation has.   Now that we live in the age of Playstation, X-Box and text messaging, you would think that eventually this particular skill would be utilized by a patient:  Rapid Thumb Movement.  (RTM)  is the ability to flex the thumb up and down at a rapid pace. This is a skill that is highly practiced among the youth of today.

I recently cared for a young man who had surgery for a severe open tibial fracture from a skate boarding mishap.  He used his video game,  “RTM skills” to press the button on his PCA pump 186 times in one hour.

For those not mathematically inclined: 3.1 times per minute, or once every 20 seconds

Despite repeated attempts to educate the young man in the proper technique of PCA use (less is more, and more is less), he refused to heed. So instead of getting a max of 10 doses an hour (1 ml q 6 minutes), he settled for 3 doses that particular hour.

The moral:

RTM may work on PlayStation to get the high score, but it doesn’t do squat for a morphine PCA pump in RL.