The Adventures of Loud Girl and Mascara Boy

1. CTM- Color, Temperature, Moisture. These are three things to check on a victims skin to make sure that they are okay. When we were being asked what colors we might see people were naming off all sorts of colors from pale to yellow to red to blue....what? Not blue? loud girl was asking for another word for blue. I piped up with, "Cyanosis." She smiled for the first time ever at me meaning that I had for once made some sort of good impression on her. Yay for me. Mascara boy from across the deck yells out, "You're pre-med aren't you!!" "Um....no."

He's my biggest fan right now.

2. "These are the four quadrants of the abdomen." loud girl was telling us in lifeguarding class. She continued to demonstrate how to palpate the abdomen for a secondary survey of the victim, while asking questions as she went. "Does anybody know what is in the upper right quadrant?"

I promptly blurted out, "The liver." (I was feeling quite communicative today for some reason)

"NO." She turns to me and says. Then the rest of my classmates continued to spit out everything from intestines to stomach to thyroid gland. (Obviously somebody is in need of an anatomy class.) Every time she kept asking I kept saying the liver. After four times of saying the liver she finally says no to me again and then exasperated with how ignorant we are she says, "The spleen."

WHAT? The spleen is now found in the upper right quadrant? I was shocked. I had always been taught that it was in the left side of the abdomen. Did they move it? Did God wake up one day with the new generation and say, "Hmmm...I think I'll start putting the spleen on the right side of the abdomen." This was all very confusing for me as I sat there mulling it over. I believe the words that came out of my mouth as I felt myself palpating my own upper right abdomen were, "No it's not!" Sadly enough, loud girl didn't hear me. The people around me did though and that's enough for me. There might be three of us that know that the spleen is not in the upper right quadrant. Whatever loud girl.



3. After this all occurred we were paired up to practice our secondary assessment on our partners. I always like it when we can pick our own partners, but for some reason loud girl felt like pairing us up herself today. Guess who my partner was? You guessed it. (If you are a regular reader of mine, I'm sure you guessed it, otherwise you are completely confused by my rambling) It was my your-mascara-is-smearing friend. What a great day. I was less than impressed with the partner selection. Having two know-it-alls (loud girl and mascara boy) in a 20 foot radius of me was going to be less than pleasurable. So there we went.

There is an acronym, SAMPLE that we were taught to use to evaluate the victim. It's things like signs and symptoms, allergies, medications and the most important of all for the sake of this story is Pertinent Previous History (more commonly known as Past Medical History).

I made it down the acronym with mascara boy down to P where I asked if he had any past history of chronic illnesses. He said, "Lung cancer." (This is pretend of course.) I proceeded down the list. He stops me. He continues on to tell me that I'm doing it wrong. He tells me that Pertinent Previous History does not relate to chronic illnesses like I had asked, but to what had happened before the injury occurred, such as running on the deck of the pool before slipping and falling. I listened as politely as I could and when he was done I said, "What does E mean then?" as E said, "Events leading up to injury." He told me that that meant what was going on the DAYS previous to the injury. I tried to put together how the events for the past few days were going to at all help knowing that he had just slipped and fallen on the deck but to give him the benefit of the doubt I said, "I'm going to ask, just to make sure."

When loud girl was done with the two people next to us I said, "Pertinent Previous History is the same as Past Medical History dealing with chronic illnesses correct?"

"Yes."

Mascara boy was shocked that he was wrong. He cheerily said, "I guess you were right. Good job." and then continued to hold up his hand as if wanting a high five. I ignored it.

Awkward.

I should have let him think I was pre-med.