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Friday, January 20, 2006
Going straight to the point: it is an advantage if a pharmacists know how to speak english, jiang hua yu, cakap melayu, gong hokkien and... hmm this is tricky gong guan dong hua (speak cantonese did i get it right?? haha). Makes me wonder our lecturers can speak how many languages haha.
This my fourth week in alexandra hosp. Got a rare opportunity to go to a clinic on the 2nd floor "which ive forgotten the name" where a pharmacist would obtain the INR results from the patient and counsel them on whether they are consistantly taking their warfarin medication. The target range for INR is around 2-3 in these patients. If they're results falls below these range means that their blood is too 'thick' so must increase dose vice versa. Yup.. no need pack drugs for the morning hehe just sit one corner in the room and watch the 'pro' pharmacists counsel in not one but 5 different languages in the different patients!!
There was this 'interesting' patient who entered and his INR reading was like 1.23. When asked by the pharmacist why he's not consistantly taking his medication he say in hokkien he sometimes take sometime dun take coz take everyday his 'ka' will swell like balloon. The weird thing is that... if im not wrong warfarin doesnt cause edema. So after some investigation by the pharmacist, he was prescribed by some other cardiac doctor before a drug which i guess it's furosemide la because when the pharmacist asked whether he got take the 'pang jo (hokkien for urinating) drug or not he replied: 'no la! cannot tahan this drug man always go toilet!' Then i was like lol joker man this guy face expression... And also a yellow pill(potassium chloride) to go with it to prevent hypokalemia coz of loss of potassium in urine.
I'm starting to love pharmacology man all the things studied in school proves to be really helpful in understanding what is going on around in my attachment here. Not to mention packing... think positively and not a robot packer, that packing can get u familiarise and remember the drugs more easily. If dunno whats the drug for then juz pull out the patient information leaflet or the different references to check it out. No time just remember or write the name and check it out when free ;)
- Janson Ang
Last blogged at 11:38 PM
