Your Favorite School Nurse

To ice or not to ice? This is an issue I face daily as the school nurse. The little ones get bumped and boo-boo'ed and the first thing everyone thinks is "oh dear, you need ice for that pain!". But when is it appropriate to give ice for an injury and when is it not appropriate? First of all, why is ice even used? When you get an acute (new) injury, your body is programmed to start an inflammatory response - your blood vessels dilate (get wider) drawing more blood to the site of the injury to try and heal it. This creates redness, heat, swelling, and often pain. Your body may also create a bruise - some of the tiny blood vessels break from the injury and a little blood leaks out under the surface of the skin and creates that bluish/greenish/purplish bruise (ouch!). The purpose of the ice is to help reduce this inflammatory response. Ice will help reduce swelling, reduce the appearance and pain of bruising. Ice can also slow bleeding a bit by helping the blood vess...

So you've received the dreaded phone call from school: your kid has head lice. After you have gotten yourself together and stopped scratching your own head (phantom lice, I totally get it), I can give you some tips and info. Lice are icky, itchy, no fun all around and sometimes expensive to deal with. They do NOT, however, transmit any diseases.  Lice are also NOT an indicator of how clean or dirty a person or their environment is. Lice actually prefer to hang out in clean hair over dirty hair.  Lice are transmitted by direct contact with someone who already has LIVE lice in their hair - this includes touching heads, sharing hats, hairbrushes, hair accessories, and sometimes scarves or pillows.  They are NOT transmitted by flying, hopping, or being in the same room as a person who has them.  Lice can only survive for about 24 hours when not on a human host. That means that once the bugs jump off the person's head and go on a carpet or a sofa, they won't liv...

So your kid has asthma, and they go to school. Here's what the school nurse needs you to know about that: 1. I need you to understand what asthma is and isn't. Asthma is not a cough or a cold. Asthma is not being out of breath from physical activity. Asthma is a big deal.  Asthma is an inflammation and swelling of the small tubes within the lungs that help a person exchange oxygen into their blood. Without good oxygen exchange, our brains and bodies can not function very well. It can be very serious, even deadly, if not managed. Asthma is caused by a few things: Genetics : a lot of the time if a mom or dad or blood-related family member has asthma it can be passed on to kids. You can't stop it from happening but you can manage it. Some kids grow out of it as they get older, some do not.  Environment : Living in a city with lots of smog and bad air quality (such as our lovely City of Brotherly Love) can have a harmful effect on breathing and lead to ast...