The First Week

I have completed my first week as a PY4!! Monday was full of orientation with a few more bits on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. Tuesday was my first full day at my rotation site for the month, BMNMTC.

Tuesday and Wednesday mornings I went to Care Plan meetings to talk about selected patients on the Alzheimer's units. Its really interesting to me to hear the whole team talk about the progression of the patients and then to go back to the pharmacy with the pharmacists and talk about different ways to behaviorally or pharmacologically manage the patient.

Tuesday afternoon I wrote a quick drug fact sheet about a new anti-seizure medication that was approved in June. The neurologist that consults for the Center was one of the test sites for the approval process and was coming Friday to discuss the drug with the doctors at the Center. (Interesting fact: one of my pharmacy professors actually discovered the compound for the drug.) Wednesday afternoon I had orientation at the Asheville Buncombe County Christian Ministry Clinic (ABCCM Clinic) which is a free clinic for un- and under-insured residents. We will all be volunteering at the clinic one evening a month this year.

Thursday morning I helped with cart fill at BMNMTC. Every Monday and Thursday the pharmacy switches out the med carts with a new 3 or 4 day supply of meds for the patients. They have a pre-packing machine that unit doses they medications (basically individually wraps each pill) that is very similar to the one at Presbyterian Hospital, so the staff was very impressed I already knew how to run their machine. We had our first seminar meeting Thursday afternoon. Dr. Haile, the director of the drug information center at the hospital, led a statistics review to help with our future assignments. He's a very nice guy, but NONE of us like the statistics!!

Friday was my favorite day of the week. Norm, one of the pharmacists at BMNMTC, and I did drug reviews. Each of the pharmacists has to do a medication/drug review on each patient monthly. We spent most of the day on the unit looking through charts. We looked at behavioral changes, sleep patterns, and eating patterns which can indicate response to medications, and possible depression. We looked for drug interactions, and controlled lab values, and had lots of discussions about drugs. I also got to put faces with a lot of the names I had heard in the Care Plan meetings over the week.

Fun things for the week:
Thursday night Kelly, Anna, Allison, John (Allison's fiancee), and I went to an Asheville Tourists game. The Tourists are the single A baseball team and it was a double header due to rain earlier in the week. It was also Thirsty Thursday, yay $1 drafts and pretzels, hot dogs, nachos, and all the other smells of a ballpark!
Friday night we ventured out in downtown a little bit. We met at the Thirsty Monk for a round of drinks or two. It was a cool place that wasn't very crowded or smokey with a wide selection of beers.
Saturday met Kelly and her aunt and uncle in Black Mountain for the Sourwood Festival. There were vendors everywhere trying to sell thier jewelry, pottery, cookware, artwork, bags, clothes, you name it. Again, the smell of fair/festival food filled the air and was absolutely delicious. It was fun to walk around and see things, I even got some slow churned home-made ice cream and some honey. The people that sold the honey even donate a portion of their sales to JDRF!

Sorry for the long post, its been an exciting week. Now for some reading and research!