Man it's been a long time since I updated. I knew I was going to be busy but this is ridiculous. I started out my intern year in the MICU, which is a pretty steep learning curve but I'm glad to get the worst out of the way. Although I've spent a lot of time just trying to learn the system, the pathology is really interesting too. I've had some pretty intense days and then some pretty laid back days too.
There are 3 shifts: short, long, and nights. On shorts, I usually get there about 6am, pre-round, get signout from the night intern, and then we round for about 3-4 hours. After I get my notes done, I usually stay until 1pm or so depending if the attending teaches. On longs, I leave around 7:30pm usually after signing out to the night intern. On nights, I get there at 7pm and stay up with the nocturnal intensivist attending until 7am but usually around 8:30-9am when I got new admits and had stay to present and round the new patient with the rest of the day team. That's basically the gist of my schedule.
I've been on a 2 day vacation so now I have the time to write. My worst stretch was the 2 longs and 7 nights in a row but I was lucky not to get slammed. I did have a lot of intense codes to run to. One day, I had 8 codes and 2 of them were pretty hardcore. Both were post-CABG patients who got their chests cracked open right in the ICU. One of them was our team's patient who coded AS WE WERE ROUNDING on him and presented with a cardiac tamponade. The other one was a bloody mess that I'll always remember. He had a ventricular free wall rupture from a recent MI. I felt helpless as we all just stood there and watched him hemorrhage to death after all those chest compressions to get his pulse back.
I usually have some pictures but I'm feeling lazy and this post is getting way too long. Maybe next time.
