Top Stories This Week

CHF, COPD, CF & now —

Meet EVALI, your newest lung disease acronym: E-cigarette or Vaping product use-Associated Lung Injury. And according to the CDC, it's on the rise. It might land you a patient with an admission stay anywhere from 5-55 days, with a high likelihood of readmission. As flu & RSV season pick up, the CDC anticipates admission rates related to EVALI to only get worse. In the works is an ICD-10 code to properly track (and bill for) these cases.

Doctors Without Borders and the fight against Tuberculosis —

Doctors Without Borders is asking Johnson & Johnson to cut the price of a lifesaving TB drug in half after the WHO recommended that the oral drug (bedaquiline) be used as part of the treatment for drug-resistant TB. They are calling for more accessibility in the form of the oral medication over those requiring painful injection as well as a more affordable price along with it. I think we'd all prefer to give one less shot.

Good news for Breast Cancer Awareness Month —

A new form of immunotherapy makes hidden cancer cells more obvious to the immune system. This new technology has only been tested in mice so far, but it has shown optimistic results, with receptive immune systems spotting and eliminating tumors at greater rates: "[it] reduced or eliminated melanoma and triple-negative breast and pancreatic tumors in mice, even those located far from the primary tumor source." Simpler manufacturing and trials with human cancer patients are soon to come!

Not just a nurse, also a parent —

A study of physician mothers demonstrated unanimous desire for more support for maternity leave and the experience returning to work. Taking maternity leave resulted in lower peer evaluation scores, thousands of dollars of potential income lost, and increased call both before and after leave. They voiced their needs for thriving as parents and professionals, asking for paid leave, adequate breast pumping time without penalty, on-site childcare, and schedule flexibility. With similar lifestyles of shift-work, long hours, scheduling rigidity, and limited PTO, does the same apply to nurse parents?

Teen donates hundreds of barbies with prosthetic legs to children's hospital —

It comes with no surprise that sometimes our pediatric patients can be self conscious about the things that make them different from their peers. So naturally, our hearts melted when we heard about Chloe Newman, a teen with a prosthetic leg, who donated hundreds of dolls with prosthetic limbs to her local children's hospital. Why? She wants children with similar conditions to feel beautiful just the way they are. Kids these days..... can be pretty great.

Exhaustion's worth a thousand words —

...for all the right reasons. Back in July, nurse Caty Nixon's sister snapped a photo of Caty following four straight shifts in a row (53+ hours) and a particularly difficult day. In the photo, she's sitting in an EZ chair with a plate of food on her lap, crying. No, the photo wasn't taken to make fun of her, it was to share the incredible and exhausting work nurses do every day. Give it a read, and a share, for all of the tireless nurses you know!