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Icu Nurse

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Critical Care

On Tuesday, February 23rd I had my rotation in the Critical Care Unit at Memorial Hospital. This was an amazing experience. My nurse was assigned to two patients (she told me that each nurse should only have one patient but…Hmm…) Anyways, we had one patient that had been there overnight and at about 9:30 in the morning we received a patient transferred from the ER.
The first patient was originally in the hospital for a gastric sleeve, which she did get but during the procedure she coded. They found that she had cardiomyopathy and was admitted to the critical care unit. This patient hemoglobin levels had been low and throughout the night and day had received 5 units of blood. Since her levels continued to be low they thought there may be some internal bleeding going on. So, they ordered an Upper GI. I helped transfer the patient down to radiology and observe the diagnostic test. It was a pretty simple test. She just had to drink the contrast which by the expression on her face did not taste very well. The preliminary reading sis not show anything but there were still waiting on confirmation and further test orders when it was time for me to leave.
The second patient I had came from the ER and was unconscious and continually having seizures. He was already on Propofol and Adivan when he came down and he was still having muscle twitching every 10 seconds. He was also a dialysis patient so they had just ordered labs and we drew his blood. It was a whirlwind while I was there. So much was going on with this patient. We had a tech come in and set up his continuous EEG, there were doctors coming and going from different specialties, of course he was on telemetry, we gave him a rectal tube and an NG tube. One of the doctors ordered a paralytic so he could get rid of the muscle twitching so he could get a true EEG. We were monitoring this for a little

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