Week 10

Hello there!

Like last week, I did not go in to the clinic much this week.  I got back Tuesday from my trip to Virginia, and Dr. Stein will be out of town this Thursday and next Monday.   I was able to go in on Wednesday with Dr. Weiland, and I saw a few memorable patients, which I will talk about later in this post.

Because I was not able to go into the clinic much, I am almost finished with my analysis!  I have yet to compare the data that I have collected with national data, but I calculated the percent closure of 10 wounds from different patients from visit to visit and the percent closure over the course of about 3 months.  I also calculated the average percent closure over 3 months from all 10 patients.  Although I initially had no idea how to use Excel, with the guidance of Mr. Loudenslagel, I realized that you can plug in a formula into a certain "cell" and copy and paste it to adjacent cells.  This greatly increased my efficiency.  Instead of using a calculator to calculate the percent closure from visit to visit and recording each data point, I simply inserted the formula ((Y1-Y2)/Y1)*100)-- the percent change formula.  I was then able to copy the relationship between Y1 and Y2, and paste it to another set of data points.  However, I did encounter one obstacle : I have an extreme outlier in my pool of data.  And, as we've learned in Statistics, this would cause my study to be statistically insignificant.  When I return to the clinic next week, I hope to find another patient to use, but for now I've calculated the average percent closure over 3 months for all 10 patients with and without the outlier.

The most memorable patient I saw this week was certainly a decubitus ulcer.  These are most commonly known as a pressure ulcer or a bed sore.  Decubitus ulcers are caused by prolonged pressure on a certain area of the body that causes damage to the tissue.  So far the pressure ulcers I've seen are on the ankle or foot somewhere, usually in diabetic patients.  They are also usually not as severe as other types of wounds.

The patient I saw had an incredibly severe decubitus ulcer.  It was located on his lower back, and, Dr. Weiland told me that it used to be so severe that you could see the entire pelvic bone in the wound.  Although it had apparently improved since last visit, it was still extremely large.

Hopefully next week I can finally finish my analysis!