Emotions and Intellectual Function – Stroke Nursing Care in Med-Surg

00:01 Okay. Hey, good job. I know that we're all in a rush, and we're all in a hurry, and so, oftentimes, it's hard to take that extra couple of minutes and pause and go through those exercises, but I want to encourage you to keep doing it.

00:14 That's the work of learning. And also, let me say while we're talking about that, if you're finding yourself struggling, you've made me happy, okay? Because the struggle means that's where the learning's happening.

00:27 If everything is just sliding right in, it's going to do like a White Castle hamburger, it's going to slide right in and slide right out.

00:35 So, if you're struggling to keep up, that's fantastic. That's what we're looking for because that means your brain is working on really processing that information.

00:46 Now, we're going to talk about stroke and emotions. A patient may have been very calm and low key before a stroke, but man afterwards, they are all over the place. They may have a hard time controlling their emotions.

00:59 You might see them have extreme emotions like crying or very angry, so they might be very exaggerated and unpredictable.

01:08 Now, this is a scary ride for the patient and for the family members, so help guide them to know that this is very common after a stroke, right? It's very challenging to deal with a functional impairment, and also they might have some difficulties with depression; completely understandable.

01:26 But help patients know they're not the only one to go through this.

01:30 Very common after a stroke. And they're not weak because they are experiencing it.

01:35 It's their brain trying to recover. So when we talk about intellectual function, there's emotions, and then there's intellectual functions. Now, it depends on what the patient's roles and interests were before they had the stroke.

01:51 But if they were really in the highly cognitive stuff, they may notice a bigger impairment, because there's a wide range of possible impairment with memory and judgment. Now, we all need memory and judgment, but we also know that there's a wide range of intellectual function before and after the stroke.

02:09 So, you're going to collaborate with a therapist, the family, the significant others, the other nurses, and healthcare providers to really identify how your patient is doing in intellectual function. So, let's practice with Mr. Johnson.

02:24 What do you know about him? Well, we know that he's having difficulty with speech, right? So pause for a minute and think through again. I'm going to ask you to recall to what we've talked about previously, what are you going to do differently in communicating with Mr. Johnson? Okay, how are you going to respond when Mr. Johnson doesn't understand what you're saying? What are you going to do to make sure that you have clearly understood what Mr. Johnson is trying to communicate to you? What type of questions would you use for him? Remember, Mr. Johnson had a left-sided stroke and he's having some difficulty with dysarthria and expressive aphasia.

03:07 So now you know specifically what he has. How will you deal with the dysarthria? What are specific strategies you plan to use with expressive aphasia? Okay, cool. Now, I really love it when you actually try and think through this stuff because this is where it makes a difference.

03:26 You taking what you're learning and studying and actually applying to how you're going to interact with real, live people.