Week 2 Infectious Disease

Well this week is off to a good start - we had a nice morning where he let me be to look up information on all our patients.  I reported sufficient information to him, so that's always good - I hate to come up short.  One of our patients who has a history of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia has upper lung lobe pneumonia of some kind and when I looked up his information I didn't see the positive quantiferon gold test for tuberculosis (he comes from an endemic region).  When I went to check in on him he hadn't yet been transferred to isolation, so then when I learned about the test then 10 minutes later when we went in to see him together he was in isolation and we were wearing our face masks.  

My preceptor told a funny-creepy story today.  When we were discussing antibiotic therapies with the pharmacists, a patient came up who was 100 years old and in a persistent vegetative state, and the daughter is refusing to let up on aggressive treatment.  It reminded my preceptor of a patient he saw some time ago who was brain dead, and had been for months, and the son refused to let them stop treatment, despite the man's mother being on a ventilator, and essentially brain dead.  The difference between persistent vegetative state and brain dead is that the former is specifically nonfunctioning of the cerebral hemispheres (higher thinking), while the latter includes the brainstem (basic respiration, reflexes).  So one day he was doing a status check on the brain dead patient and saw something on the patient's earlobe - it was a maggot.  Apparently somehow a fly had gotten into the mouth and/or ear and laid eggs and there were maggots in the throat/mouth and ear.  Kinda adds new meaning to someone being 'brain dead'.  

I also had a mini-victory today - we were talking about one patient who had a few trichomonads on her urine analysis and he asked me what the treatment is for that, and as he was adding, "do you have your Sanford guide on you?" (which is our booklet for antimicrobial therapy) I just answered without skipping a beat the first line and second line treatments.  I guess he didn't expect me to know off the top of my head, so I was pleased with myself, even if it was a super easy question for me.