What?
Service learning is not turning out like I had hoped. The lady we were coordinating with has stopped emailing me and will not answer when I call her. She won't even let me leave a voicemail, she simply hangs up. I am feeling very frustrated right now. We have to get this project done but it is very hard with everything going on in other classes and when people won't answer their cell phones.
In class we talked about nutrition and obesity. I really enjoyed watching the documentary Fat. I really liked the way it talked about obesity in several different ways. It included the standard "obesity will kill you" and the sad stories about people who are made fun of for the way they look. But it also disspelled some myths about obesity such as "obese people are lazy." The overweight ladies in the dance troupe spent several hours a week engaging in physical activity and the comedian had to work out 3 hours (!) every day just to keep the weight off.
So what?
So now that we feel out of luck on our previous service learning project we must look forward to trying some new project. I tried to contact Volunteer Services at Intermountain Medical Center where I work to see if they have any projects we could work on and add to. But they were closed for today, One of my group members said that she will try to contact her church's youth groups to see if there is anyway we could do some sort of service with them . I hope we can go help them out and teach them something about their health.
I think that in regards to obesity people need to be more open minded. I think that a lot of people believe exercise and eating right will cause everyone to be extremely thin but that is not true at all. Especially as seen by the people in the documentary we watched. Yes, it will help you to lose weight but some people set unrealistic expectations on what they should look like. One of the ladies in the video, I think she was a doctor, said that people come to her and say that they were exercising but they didn't lose any weight so they stopped. The doctor was appalled because losing weight wasn't the goal she had in mind for these patients. The goal was to be healthier.
I had a patient at work the other day who was moderately overweight. In talking to her I found out that she once weighed over 300 lbs and had gastric bypass surgery a few years ago. She said it was the dumbest thing she had ever done. She ended up having major complications and losing her stomach completely. Now she says she eats a healthy diet and she rides 100 mile bike marathons. Her health was evident when I did her vital signs. She was on no medications other than ibuprofen and her blood pressure was in the 100's over 60's and her resting heart rate was in the low 40's. She did not look healthy but apparently she was very healthy.
Now what?
Our service learning project will come somehow, someway. We will have to wait until the weekend is over to really get any sort of headway on that front. I hope for the best. I'm actually kind of glad the hunger banquet thing didn't work out because I don't think we could have turned out a quality project from that.
When it comes to people being overweight I believe that we need to look past appearances and into the actual health of the person. I am not obese but I am a little overweight and I know that when I go to the doctor he will make some comments that will make me feel very uncomfortable. I wonder how he makes people who are obese feel. I have learned that many overweight people put off going to the doctor because of the way they make them feel so the patients are not getting the proper health screenings they need. I hope that as a nurse I can be less judgmental of my patients and actually help them to be healthy instead of pushing them to lose weight.
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