MICU

I survived 4 weeks in the MICU, aka medical ICU. For the non-medical people, the MICU deals with serious "medical" problems -- e.g., bad pneumonia requiring a ventilator, bad cases ond H1N1, sepsis, kidney failure, cancer, other bad infections -- while there are other ICUs for post-surgical issues (surgical ICU aka SICU). There are also similar places for heart disease (cardiac care unit or CCU), traumatic injury (trauma ICU or TICU), etc.

It was a hard month. "Sleeping" in the hospital every 3rd night, aka working through the night every 3rd night, gets old fast. I'm glad to be done with it. But I also had a really interesting time, and I learned a ton. Lots of sick people requiring a lot of care = many opportunities to practice medicine. I placed about a dozen central lines and became much more comfortable starting patients on pressors than I ever expected to be. I also realized how Not Sick many of the so-called Sick patients I see on other rotations really are. If your kidneys are still working and your lungs aren't filled with fluid, walk it off. Or something like that.

We did have a half-dozen patients with H1N1 influenza. A few were really, really sick for weeks. Most were just semi-ill for a few days and then got transferred to the floor. Seeing patients who had been on a ventilator for over a week because of H1N1 certainly made me careful about always wearing a mask!

Next month: orthopedics! And a week of vacation! And Christmas!