in becoming an ICU nurse

Phew! I'm off today! This week was pretty tiring. I had ICU classes from Monday to Wednesday, from 8am to 3:30pm, and then next week again, same days and time. I'm really not a morning person. It's just that I'm too lazy to get up early, seems like my body clock is made to be functioning well at nights. Oh well, that happened since I started working nights. I remember that I hated nights before during college days, hehe. Anyways, it was not really information overload that got me to feel tired for the past few days. It's the lack of sleep actually. Last Monday night, we went to hard rock at bayside with my colleagues, just for dinner and catching up, so we stayed up a lil late over there, then i needed to wake up early. Plus the sometimes-boring lectures that we have. But I do appreciate some of the topics that we had discussed, especially the Hemodynamics and the neuro part specifically the ICP monitoring and the discussion about ventriculostomy. I should read about that later on, coz we're goin to have an exam on wednesday. I need to understand further the concept about the Intraaortic balloon pump as well as the Swan-Ganz catheter, their monitoring and stuff. It's a big role for an ICU nurse to understand this hemodynamics, and I guess once you know how to deal with it, then surely you can testify to yourself that you are really an ICU nurse, hehehe! Dr Gottlieb, one of our consultants in Pulmo, also discussed concepts re Respiratory distress. One thing he emphasized was the Oxygen Sat of the patient is not always reliable. A person could sat 100% yet he's not doing good anymore. But then again, the most exciting part was the NEURO, discussed by Ms Amy Eisenberg. She's an ARNP and a CNRN as well, and mind you she's a Filipino. Winner pa rin ang mga Pinoy! hehehe.

Those lectures about the drips and the pacers are the most boring part! hahaha! It got me closing my eyes already, and I was in front. Oh one more thing, the funniest part is that I think I am the youngest (in terms of age) among the nurses there in the class, but I'm the senior in terms of being an RN. The rest of them are new, most of them are fresh out of school. It's just that all of us are new in the ICU environment. So yeah, some topics are quite redundant for me already, such as the protocols and the paperworks to be done. Nevertheless, it's an opportunity for me to learn something new and interesting, to get to know new faces too, and of course it's an added credit to my CEUs.