I started this class off by volunteering at St. James place on the weekends. I had an odd mix of feelings when I was volunteering, it rewarding and discouraging at the same time. It put me face to face with what my future is down the road. But it also showed me what it’s like to have lived a life. I have Ms. Dona Jacobs to thank for that. Her company and her stories really encouraged me to go out and do even more volunteering with the elderly. There aren’t a lot of young people that take the time out of their day to visit those that came before us, and because I had such a good time with Ms. Dona, I want to be different from the rest of my generation.

I was truly looking forward to spending a portion of my weekends with Ms. Dona but my visits were cut short due to COVID-19. To be honest, my entire freshman year was cut short due to the virus. I am still upset about having to move back home because my college life was actually fun. At college I actually had true freedom, but now that I’m back home with my mom, it is not the same. In addition, we are in quarantine/lock down in Los Angeles County and I have yet to see my family in person. I’ve been home for a month now and the only person I have seen is my mom. It’s really depressing to have to go from living in college dorm, to suddenly living back with my mom.

I have two more weeks left of my freshman year and I have one more major assignment due. My Lit-Review for English 2001. My research paper is on how there are years worth of research on ALS causes and yet not one universal cause has been found for sporadic ALS. In addition to all of that research, very few papers actually talk about how patients and their families are affected. If I am being honest, the only reason why research is being done is for those patients diagnosed with a disease and yet, there is little to no research on how patents live with the disease. In my paper, I want to talk about the lack of research and how it is important for nurses to be as educated as they can even when they don’t have all the answers. If I stress how little research is done on finding ALS causes and how ALS patients live, then hypothetically nurses will pay more attention to those causes and patients livelihoods and learn from them and talk about them.

Lastly this English 2001 has honestly prepared me for the next level writing I will have to do in Nursing School. I can analyze, review literature, write a personal statement, and professionally convey a message. Thank you Mrs. Dorothy McCaughey.

Paragraph 1 answers Questions 1-3. 

My most recent source is a CDC report on ALS. It was published on April 5, 2017. There is no known author but it is a reputable source from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. My oldest source is an academic journal titled What causes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis written by Sarah Martin, Ahmad Khleifat and Ammar Al-Chalabi. It was published online March 28, 2017. Published by F1000Research. It is also the source that comes from the most expert writer because it is an official report published by the CDC that explains important facts about ALS.

A lot of my sources tell me about the causes of the disease and the symptoms but there are so many different causes that can lead to ALS, so there are no universal, similar causes that explain how each patient got the disease. I’m researching the causes to find whether there are patients who have similar causes for their ALS diagnosis but since there is a variety of known causes I will elaborate on how many different environmental and biological factors can cause ALS. Some sources told me about the duration of the disease and how it affects those diagnosed with it. There was only a handful of sources that actually talk about how the patient’s livelihoods are affected by the disease. Some have to get caregivers after a couple of years, others need to pay for treatments, medicine and wheelchairs. They really gave me insight on how much a patient’s life changes once diagnosed.

Other sources told me about the many exams that have to be given to patients to actually diagnose ALS. Different sources had different exams listed for the diagnosis of ALS. There isn’t one test that doctors can use to determine if a person has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Instead, doctors need to perform a series of tests to eliminate other similar neurological diseases and to arrive at an ALS diagnosis. I think its weird that researchers don’t have research on how ALS patients’ lives are affected by the disease. I think the effects of the disease are just as important as the causes and symptoms. More research should be done about the effects so that patients can actually see what their lives might possibly be.

I can see that everyone is not on the same page about effective treatments for ALS. That could be because not enough treatments are being researched effectively, and it also takes years to see the long-term effects of treatments. There is a lack of common treatments that are being recommended to patients.  

Authors: Masamitsu Okada, Satoshi Yamashita, Hidetsugu Ueyama, Masatoshi Ishizaki, Yasushi Maeda, and Yukio Andob

Article title: Long-term effects of edaravone on survival of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Title of scholarly journal and date published: May 17, 2018

The newsmakers are docotors who are writing about the new drug Edaravone, its a free radical scavenger that was approved as a therapeutic drug for ALS in 2015 in Japan. A clinical trial demonstrated a smaller decline in ALS. However, the long-term effects of edaravone on ALS patients remain unclear. The article investigate the long-term effects of edaravone on the survival of ALS patients. Because the drug is fairly new, the long term effects have not been discovered yet. However when taking the drug there are the usual side effects such as headache, skin inflammation or rash, eczema, respiratory failure, respiratory disorder, and oxygen deficiency. The drug also either works or it doesn’t.

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According to Wikipedia, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as motor neuron disease is a disease that causes the death of neurons controlling voluntary muscles. ALS is characterized by stiff muscles, muscle twitching, and gradually worsening weakness due to muscles decreasing in size. Most patients with ALS eventually lose the ability to walk, use their hands, speak, swallow, and breathe. There is no cure for ALS is known but the goal of treatment is to improve symptoms.

The cause of ALS is not known in 90% to 95% of cases, but is believed to involve both genetic and environmental factors. The remaining 5–10% of cases are inherited from a person’s parents. I narrowed the topic to write a literature review on research looking for the causes of ALS and how this motor neuron disease affects someone’s life. I hope to find the main causes of the disease and to have an insight on how someone with ALS lives day to day.

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The Corona virus is obviously affecting me in a negative way. My freshman year at Louisiana State University has been cut short due to the virus. I have to move back to California, where there are 335 confirmed cases as of 3 hours ago. The virus isn’t as bad as mass media portrays it to be, but because so many people are in fear it make me want to worry also. However, not all of the effect are negative, President Trump has waived federal loan interest. Overall. the corona virus has impacted my life negatively, but it’s not as bad as others.

This virus has honestly taught me a lot. On social media I keep seeing other people’s family members pass away from the virus, so I am really trying to contact my family and stay in contact with them just in case anything bad happens. Also, I can honestly say that I cherish everyday more than I did last semester. What I have noticed since the virus outbreak is complete chaos, and I really believe its the media’s fault. I also feel that the economy will suffer due to the outbreak because of the shortage of merchandise in stores. Even if there is a cure or vaccine for the virus, there will still be costly affects after the world calms down because of this huge wave of fear.

At St. James place there wasn’t much happening, so I had to leave early because there wasn’t much to do after awhile. But while I was there I saw Ms. Dona giving dance lessons to one of the other volunteers. I stopped to speak to her to see if she remembered me and she did! She said ” I remember all of the volunteers I hang out with, I just don’t remember their names” then she laughed. Eventually I let her get back to her dance lessons. The whole time I was there I was cleaning up Mardi Gras decorations and just returning the place back to its original state. While I was cleaning I saw many of the seniors conversation and enjoying each other company. I noticed that the caregivers and nurses aren’t in the seniors way. During this specific volunteering experience I witnessed a different style of nursing. They leave them alone and let them live their lives. I realized that even though the caregivers are there to take care of the seniors that doesn’t involve being right next to them all of the time. In fact many seniors just press a certain number on their phones or on the keypads on the walls, and the caregivers will show up. I thought it was very interesting to see how nurses and senior patients interact. In hospitals and clinics, nurses are expected to be with a patient 80% of the time, but in this particular nursing home, the nurses where away from the seniors 60% of the time. I think that’s because Saint James Place is an assisted living nursing home. most of the seniors can still take care f themselves, while in hospitals those patients need assistance to take care of themselves.

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I volunteered at St. James place and I spoke with Ms. Dona Jacobs. We played dominoes with two other volunteers after I had already saw her for an hour earlier that same day. I asked Ms. Dona more questions and I learned more about her. She told me about how she first met her husband, her home town Montana, and she promised to teach me how to ballroom dance the next time I visit her.

Ms. Dona is from a small town in Montana. When she first met her husband it was a Saturday night and she was in a dance studio giving ballroom dance lessons. Her husband walked in looking like a bum asking for lessons! She said his pants were so dirty, and his shirt was a dirty yellow and she was shocked because he told her he was in the Air Force. But to her he did not look like it. After their first lesson together, she invited him out with her friends to a bar to watch the Shy Boys sing. The rest was history for them. I am going back to Ms. Dona tomorrow and St James has a lot of activities planed for them so Ms. Dona and I don’t have to keep playing dominoes. They are having a dance party, and Mardi Gras mask decoration so it will be a lot of fun. Ms. Dona and I are getting closer and bonding, she has plenty more stories to tell me so there will never be a dull moment.

I volunteered at St. James Place for two hours and it was so interesting. I spent most of my time playing dominoes with Dona Jacobs, a former ballroom dancer who was married to a veterinarian in the Air Force. After the first hour two other volunteers joined us and it became a whole party.

Ms. Dona beat me seven times in dominoes and I only won once. She has a strong sense of humor. She kept me laughing the whole time. She told me about the year she spent living in Iceland because her husband was stationed there and all of the states she has been to when she was younger. What caught my attention was how she wouldn’t stop talking about a special nurse that goes out of her way to make the seniors decorations for every holiday. I can’t remember her name but Ms. Dona was just gushing over this nurse; she said she was the best nurse to have a conversation with and bond with. That made me realize that Ms. Dona really appreciates a good, interesting conversation and I have to do better at providing that for her. Since this was my first hour with Ms. Dona we were both kind of feeling each other out to see if we liked each other. But all it took was 5 minutes get comfortable with each other and talk. However, for next time, I am going to have more questions, and be more talkative with Ms. Dona, because I can tell that she wants someones to talk to and tell stories to.

My name is Acacia Skanes and I was born and raised in Southern California. I realized I wanted to be a Labor and Delivery nurse when I was 13 years old. It was June 24, 2013 when my God siblings were born, and I was there to witness their delivery. Back then I thought the twin’s delivery was nasty but the look on my God mother’s face when the nurse handed her the twins was mesmerizing. Many future labor and delivery nurses say they want to deliver babies because the delivery process is magical, and they love babies. Me on the other hand, I wanted to be a labor and delivery nurse because of the emotional connections that are developed when mothers are delivering. In fact, I just recently decided to expand my horizons and strive to become a Certified Nurse Midwife because I want to be more hands on and closer to my patients when they are delivering.