PICU! (And pretty boring Friday)

Sorry for being a big slacker on my blog recently, so here we go! Last week we had our two days of clinical on Wednesday and Friday. On Wednesday I got to go to the PICU, which is the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. This is a few floors up from the floor that we are on and it's a specialty floor for kids that need more involved care than they can get on the regular pediatric floors. Each person in my group got to pick either the NICU or PICU to go to for one day, and we mostly just go to observe. I had a great nurse that kind of took care of me and showed me and around the unit. She even walked around with me to try and find things for me to do and see, which was awesome because there are very few nurses that will go out of their way for a student like that. I got to watch her put in an NJ tube under fluoroscopy on a tiny baby, which just means putting a tube in from the nose to the intestines using what pretty much looks like an MRI machine. So that was something really cool that I got to be a part of and it was definitely the coolest thing I got to see. The picture for this post is of what it looked like when I watched them put the tube in. I also got to see a lot of kids that were on ventilators and watch the nurses do all of the care that goes along with that. There were also a few kids down in the PICU with different genetic disorders that I had never seen before, and there were a few kids with cancer. And I got to watch a lumbar puncture. Very cool. The unit wasn't really all that different from the regular floors, the kids just had more things that they needed done and they needed more one on one care, so each nurse has less patients than they would have on a regular floor. I could for sure see myself working in the PICU when I am a grown up. So all in all it was a REALLY cool experience and everyone was super nice on the unit. Good stuff.

Friday I was back on our regular unit and I ended up just having one patient because as I was getting on the unit to start my shift, my second patient got transferred to the PICU. So that was a bummer because then I had a pretty boring day. He was a cute little muffin though so it was okay. And I got to hang some more IV meds which is good because I've been getting to that a lot lately and I pretty much have it down. Unfortunately other than hanging two IV meds and flushing all of the lines, I really had nothing else to do other than vitals and my assessment, so it was a pretty slow and boring day. I was definitely wishing I had my second patient. But such is life. It's okay though because I'm starting to feel much more comfortable with a lot of the skills that we are doing all the time like hanging IV's and meds, working the IV pumps, flushing feeding tubes and drawing up meds into syringes. It's pretty cool to know how close we are to being real nurses. The only thing that is very frustrating about this rotation is that our instructor tends to get sidetracked easily and is always running late when we need her to give meds, or she is just impossible to find altogether. It's very annoying when you are supposed to give a med at 5:00 and at 6 you still have no idea where she is and once you do find her it takes another 3 reminders to finally get her to come with you to do it. Usually I just end up asking my nurse to do things with me because it's MUCH easier and then I don't throw all the meds for the next entire day by being late. Plus the nurses are (mostly) all very nice and willing to help as long as you are nice to them and actually doing something. So that has been working out pretty well for me and it keeps me from getting super irritated at the instructor.

Moral of the story: I really like this clinical and I'm bummed that it's almost over! (But I am VERY ready to be off of 1-8 clinical and back to 7am-3pm, which is what my next rotation is) This has definitely confirmed for me that Pediatrics is where I want to be :)