Health Implications Related to the Personal Health - Essay Example

My immediate guess was that both chemotherapy and laser therapy had affected his body metabolism to a certain extent. He was a patient very concerned about his appearance. Being just 27 years of age and unmarried, he wanted to look smart all the time. He recalled the fact that he had a very stylish hairstyle prior to undergoing chemotherapy. He lamented stroking the few remaining strands of hair remaining in his otherwise bald head. The patient said he used to look in the mirror often and was very proud of his neatly combed hair earlier, but now he was devastated by the figure looking back at him when looking in the mirror.

According to him, his hairstyle enhanced his personality and everyone used to comment on it. I knew that he was visibly shaken by his hair loss and this was affecting him psychologically. He asked me whether his hair would grow again. Due to his hair loss, he told me that his confidence was shattered and did not know how to face society once he was discharged from the hospital. Chemotherapy treatment often causes hair loss basically because the cells in the hair follicles grow fast (Baker, 1996).

Hair loss would not be a permanent issue and the hair will grow back once the patient's treatment has ended. In fact, chemotherapy damages fast-growing cells, however, all drugs will not cause hair loss and in some scenarios, it just causes thinning and others cause dramatic hair loss including body hair and eyebrows (Bandura, 1998). Moreover, different people have different tolerances to the drugs and occasionally, some people lose their hair when it is not expected and sometimes in other cases no hair loss occurs when it is expected.

The patient did not understand how certain drugs produced negative side effects in the long run, when I told him that certain chemical combinations coming from different drugs would have caused his hair roots to destabilize he thought that I was talking about some alien disease. When I explained this to him and said that his hair loss was temporary he was much relieved and satisfied. Finally, a smile appeared on his hitherto gloomy face. He thanked me a lot for enlightening him about his hair loss.

I was much satisfied when a smile finally appeared on his face. Entry two This week I had an encounter with a patient who complained of swelling in the neck and in the groin and the legs. But he was experiencing no pain. He also complained of an early feeling of fullness of the stomach and recurrent abdominal pain. He was sixteen years of age and had been an active member of the school soccer team and other sports sometime back. But now he was thin and frail and has been under medication for some time.

He lamented that he was unable to go to school and take part in soccer practices which he loved so much. He had been a boy of robust build but of late has lost a lot of weight and said he was having a feeling of 'lack of energy'. This apart he experienced chills, fevers and night sweats on a regular basis. Being the only child in the family, he was the apple in the eye of his parents. He wanted to do all that he can to make his parents proud.