New Disease of the Day: Diverticulitis

Another fun filled day of clinical placement down which is a little bit sad because it means I only have 17 days left! I started out the morning with the out patient dietitian. I hadn't met her yesterday but she's awesome. I just sat in on her assessments and appointments to see how she rolls and what she does, but hopefully I will have more hands on stuff to do tomorrow such as help assess and counsel clients. Eek! I got to learn about a couple of new diseases today such as diverticulitis. I had never even heard of it before but I feel fairly confident in my ability to counsel someone with the disease after just one day! My preceptor was really great at answering all my questions about the disease and giving me a whole bunch of handouts about it that the clients also receive. I just kind of sat in the corner and listened today which was a little boring, specially since the room is nice and cozy and warm which made it more difficult then I would have liked to stay awake. The out patient dietitian also does clinics for the community and has invited me to attend and help teach a hypertension clinic next week. A lot of her patients are referred for weight loss counseling in association with one of the many co-morbidities of being overweight such as type 2 diabetes mellitus, hypertension, hyperlipidemia etc. I don't think I will like out patient as much as impatient because I feel like you see a lot of the same thing, and a lot of weight loss which isn't exactly something I want to deal with every day.

This afternoon I was back in In Patient. We started the afternoon doing rounds. We met with all of the Nurses, Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, and manor liaisons from each wing and went over each and every patient in that wing to discuss their release and prognosis and if they need a particular service that they have not received yet (such as meeting with the dietitian). After two hours of these meetings with several different wings, I learned about so many cool and interesting people that were admitted into the hospital. There are soo many interesting and random and crazy cases in the hospital! It was really interesting and cool to hear about how they are being treated and it was nice to see how closely all the different health care teams work together within the hospital to provide the best care possible. After two hours of meetings, we finally got to go out onto the floor to see patients. We only had time to visit one person because he was complicated and had about a million food allergies. Although we can't exactly cater to everyone's individual wants and needs, we do legit try our best to keep everyone fed and happy. This particular person could not consume gluten, any bi-products of beef (meat, gelatin, dairy), soy, or legumes or fruit or anything really so we asked tons of questions and talked to the kitchen to see what we could do for them. I am very impressed with the service we provide so far, which makes it a lot easier to love working in the hospital.

After work, I headed to Starbucks and spent the evening reading through my nutrition text book to learn about reactive hypoglycemia for my clinical presentation at the end of the month. I also made sure I learned all about diverticulitis and freshened up on the medical nutrition therapy for nutrition management so that I could be more useful in my out patient placement tomorrow afternoon. I think I just need to be more vocal and outgoing tomorrow, so that's my goal. until then I'm going to watch Glee, make my lunch for tomorrow, and get everything ready for tomorrow. The extra sleep is key, specially if I don't want to be drifting off in the out patient dietitians office tomorrow afternoon!

New Disease of the Day: Diverticulitis
Diverticulitis occurs as a result of diverticulosis, which is when small pouches (called diverticula) form on the outside of the large intestine or the colon. When this pouches become clogged and inflamed, it's called diverticulitis. This can be painful and requires an altered diet to control and reduce inflammation. When the pouches are not inflamed, we recommend a high fiber diet, lots of fluids and avoidance of nuts and seeds and often those suffering will also avoid corn and peas and things that can get lodged in the pouches. The high fiber helps keep the contents of the intestine moving which helps prevent inflammation from occurring. When the pouches are inflamed however, we recommend a diet low in fiber until the inflammation subsides to rest to colon and give it time to heal and then patients should gradually re-introduce a high fiber diet. This is a just a super brief rundown so if you are suffering from diverticulosis or diverticulitis, you should see your dietitian before following any of the following advice as each individual case will have slightly different needs!