icu

Procalcitonin (PCT) is a 116 amino acid peptide precursor to calcitonin, a hormone involved in calcium homeostasis. PCT increases significantly in the context of proinflammatory bacterial infections but remains low in viral and other…

As a critical care fellow, I'll spend a total of two months (four, 2-week rotations) in the cardiac intensive care unit (ICU). I just finished my first rotation there and got to befriend many of the cardiac surgery attendings and fellows…

I spent the last two weeks in the coronary care unit (CCU) as part of my first elective. Although the CCU is an ICU, the patients are much more "medical" than surgical, and therefore, present different challenges compared to what I saw at…

Moonlighting basically entails taking on paid work on top of my normal job. Our program restricts moonlighting hours to ~20 hours per month, so we remain focused on our fellowship at hand instead of lucrative opportunities to make extra…

Here's the EPIC EMR template I made for rounding in the VAD/transplant ICU. The formatting is off (bold, centered, etc), but the shortlinks are still there for the problem list, problem list, recent vitals, VAD data, ins/outs, recent labs,…