The intensive care unit (ICU) is where the hospital’s most critically ill patients receive care. When you’re the resident in charge of stabilizing crashing patients, rapidly escalating care, responding to emergent codes around the hospital, and working with the nurses to get through the night hour-by-hour, things can get stressful.…
I’ll never get tired of new rotations making me feel like a chicken with its head cut off. After roughly 5 hours of EPIC EMR training (why must we keep doingggg thissss), my classmate and I proceeded to the ICU to meet up with our attending and fellows.
I’m officially finished with my MD Anderson ICU rotation and looking forward to my next rotation on the cardiac transplant and ventricular assist device ICU service at Texas Heart Institute. Working with critically ill cancer patients showed me the importance of prioritizing problems, many of which aren’t even medical in…
“Push FAST, GO!” I heard our ICU attending say as we hurled our patient’s stretcher down the hall towards a vacant ICU bed. “PEA arrest – as soon as we stop, someone needs to jump on the bed and start chest compressions!”
Walk through a modern day teaching hospital, and you’ll be greeted by a stream of white coats. Pharmacists, technicians, lab workers, researchers, nurse practitioners, social workers, students, physicians, and residents are difficult to tell apart. In my three weeks working in the ICU, at least three people have introduced themselves to…
Just got my ABA BasicExam results – I passed! In true board exam fashion, here is the anticlimactic posting: I’ll take the ABA Advanced Exam right after graduating from residency. Hopefully it also goes well! :-)
This weekend, I ran most of the medical ICU and had flashbacks to ICU rotations from my intern year. It’s a field I was considering from the get-go, but this weekend reinvigorated my interest in pursuing a critical care fellowship.
My ICU attending, a more experienced physician who has seen the practice of critical care evolve over decades, left me with an interesting thought yesterday. We discussed a potentially difficult airway and the need to be proactive rather than reactive, especially in the critically ill population.
I’m kicking off my third year of residency (“CA-2” in anesthesia world) working at MD Anderson Cancer Center, one of the top two cancer institutes in the country! As a medical student at Baylor Med, we had limited opportunities to work there; however, as a resident, we do an ICU…