Medical Case Scenarios

Today, I was in the emergency room for a second time. This time, I followed Vicki, who is a nurse practitioner that works in intake. Vicki and I started out by seeing a patient who had come in because she believed she had broken a rib due to excessive coughing. The patient had done this once before and had frequent coughing because she is a smoker. Vicki ordered that an X-ray so that she could see if the rib was broken or not. After looking at the X-ray Vicki believed that the eighth rib was fractured, but could not determine whether this was a new fracture or an old fracture. Vicki suggested that the patient quit smoking and take breathing treatments to get her coughing under control. Unfortunately, there was not much that could be done about the fractured rib. The next …show more content…
This patient was a seventeen-year-old girl who believed she had been exposed to a sexually transmitted disease. This girl has had two sexually transmitted diseases in the past: chlamydia and trichomoniasis. She believed she had contracted chlamydia again because she had intercourse on August 28 and her partner told her he might have chlamydia. The patient also needed a pregnancy test because she believed she could be pregnant. The Pregnancy Resource Center had told the patient that she was pregnant, but she believed she had a miscarriage since then. So, Vicki had the patient give a urine sample and then brought her to a back room for STD testing. This back room is a room designated for this very purpose. In order to test for sexually transmitted diseases, Vicki took several different swabs of the genital area: each swab is for a different disease. They would send these swabs to the lab and later find out if the patient had been infected. I was not able to find out if she had contracted any diseases, or if she was pregnant, because I had to