Pity the poor toe. The abuse these toes take. They’re made to kick things, they’re squished into shoes that are too tight, and the often get smashed into door jambs, table legs, or goodness knows what else.
When my now-20-year-old daughter was three months old, I broke the small toe on my right foot. My husband and I were going out for dinner for the first time since her birth and being home with her and my then-2-year old was driving me nuts. So, we found a trusted sitter and we were going to go out.
While we were waiting for her …read more

One area I’ve always avoided working in is burn units or anywhere where there may be people who are severely burned. The pain involved in changing the dressings and the treatments can be terrible. The dressings must be changed, the treatments must be done, but having done treatments on patients that I know cause pain, I just know that I couldn’t do this on a regular basis. I truly admire those who can do it and do do it though.
When dressings are changed, the dead tissue needs to be removed; this is called debriding the wound. And, removing the …read more

Ok, pain doesn’t always have to be serious, but it sure can be problematic.
Take, for instance, Ken Griffey Jr. pinching a testicle with his own cup, Cardinals’ kicker Bill Gramatica tears his ACL celebrating a field goal, San Francisco Giants’ manager Roger Craig cuts his hand on a bra, professional disc golfer Ron Russell swung his hand into a tree during a throw at the 2000 PDGA tournament, and Manchester City’s (soccer player) David Seaman broke a bone reaching for the TV remote.
To read how these highly paid (and sometimes over-rated!) athletes sustained their injuries, pop on over to …read more

If you’ve ever heard of Hans Brinker or read the story, you’ll know that the Dutch love their ice skating. But, with the weather changes over the past few decades, skating on the canals – which was once a popular past time – has been much less frequent than usual. Until this year.
Winter has returned strong enough to freeze the canals, allowing the people of the Netherlands to once again don their skates and zoom around on the ice as they did generations before. There’s just one problem. They’re out of practice!
According to this article, Dutch skaters a little rusty, …read more

A collapsed lung is very painful. The acute pain comes on suddenly and had been described as having a knife stuck into your side. As a nurse, I’ve seen patients with collapsed lungs and I’ve seen how panicked they can be when they feel the pain and may find it difficult to breathe.
Having a collapsed lung is not only dangerous for the obvious reason (limited breathing), but depending on the cause of the collapse, there’s a danger that the other one can collapse as well.
News reports say that 44-year-old actress Mariska Hargitay was recently rushed to the hospital with a …read more

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I know from experience, many years ago, that hangovers feel awful. Even if it’s not a full blown hangover, the headache that hits can be unbearable – or so we think. I’ve seen others, including a few offspring who shall remain unnamed go through the same thing. Legal drinking age here is 18 years old.
So, like I said, I don’t know how I feel about this: research into curing hangovers. After all, the only people who get hangovers are those who get drunk and getting drunk – the last time …read more

Winter injuries mean slips on the ice, car accidents, and wrenching your back while shoveling, right? Don’t forget adding getting your fingers or hands sliced with snowblowers. It has happened and it continues to happen to people who don’t pay attention. It even happened tohockey’s Colorado Avalanche center and captain, Joe Sakic.
The 39-year-old hockey player made a classic mistake. Having turned off the machine, he reached into the auger to clear snow but something happened and Sakic ended up with severe tendon damage and a break occurred to one finger and fractures to two others. While he is anticipated to …read more

At the beginning of November, I read of Christine M. Rupprecht, MSN, RN, a nursing specialist for the Army’s Regional & Pain Management Initiative at Walter Reed Medical Center. Ms Rupprecht had been awarded the prestigious Celina Field Caregiver Award by the National Pain Foundation (NPF).
When I read about Ms Rupprecht and what the award stands for (recognizing individuals for excellence in caregiving and for their devotion to helping those living with pain), I knew I had to try see if I could interview her. According to the press release issued by the NPF, "The National Pain Foundation is …read more

Appendicitis is something we don’t seem to hear about much any more (Your appendix and you). It seemed that at one time, everyone was having either their tonsils or their appendix removed. Now, you don’t hear about it all that much.
We experienced it here about five years ago, when my teen-aged daughter developed it and had to have an emergency appendectomy. Luckily for her, it hadn’t burst, so she was able to go  home after only one night in the hospital. But, appendicitis can be very serious. Besides being very painful, iIf the appendix bursts, it can cause peritonitis, an …read more

You know… I’ve just about had it with hurting myself.
About two months ago, we began a reno in our house to get it up to speed in order to sell it. The biggest project, by far, was to remove four walls of horrible stucco off the dining room walls. The only way to do that is to chip if off manually. So, I did.
I began doing it, the rest of the family chipped in (sorry about the pun!) from time to time. It was slow going – took about a month to get the whole room done, but we did …read more