Real-Life Math
This afternoon you're sitting in the lounge playing checkers with
your partner. You're on call, but you've had a slow afternoon.
Then you hear the ring. You jump up ready to respond. It's not an emergency
this time, but an equally important task of transporting a patient from one
hospital to another.
You get prepared to transfer the patient. You
load her into the ambulance, strap down the wheels and shut the back doors.
You run over her chart and see that she'll require another dosage of Dopamine
before you arrive at the hospital across town.
Part A
The
chart says that this woman requires 250 micrograms per minute of Dopamine
through her IV. The concentration of the IV solution is 800 umg/cc (cubic
centimeter). How many cc's per minute will be needed for 250 umg?
Now
you have figured out how many cc/minute are needed for 250 umg. How many drops
will be needed per minute of the 250 umg solution? (1 cc = 60 drops)
Part
B
Soon after you and your partner return from transferring the
patient, you receive an emergency call. A young man has had an accidental
overdose on Clomipramine, an anti-depressant.
Once at the house, you
immediately find the bottle by his bedside. The label tells you there were
30 tablets in the bottle and they were prescribed 4 days ago. Each tablet
contains 20 milligrams of the drug.
The instructions call for the pills
to be taken twice daily. The bottle is now empty. You need to tell the hospital
how much of the drug the victim has ingested.
Estimate how many tablets
he has taken and figure out how much of the drug he should have in his system.