Week 1 & 2. Life in ICU

For the first week, I couldn't meet my clinician, and I start to shadow my clinician from this week (week 2). I shadowed rounds and meetings in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) daily. Every morning, they talked about patients’ status and made decision about which medication they should use, how much dose, and whether the patient need additional surgery, etc. There are about 10 patients who usually have severe symptoms or just had their surgery. The doctors mainly checked the level of various materials in blood (Sodium, Hemoglobin, glucose, and etc) and also check various imaging results (mainly CT and MRI).

At the beginning (and I still am), I was overwhelmed by a lot of jargons and abbreviations that they used. So, I was standing there totally feeling idiot. It was just perfect combination of my lack of English and poor understanding in jargons. So, I decided to try one by one. From Tuesday, I tried to catch something (at least one thing) that I know from their conversation, and tried to understand one by one, or to ask questions about it. For example, I heard them talking about sodium level. I then thought why sodium level in blood is important in brain surgery patient. I made hypothesis that it would probably related to brain pressure, and sodium concentration gradient cause osmotic pressure. Sometimes, my hypothesis was correct like in this case. Sometimes, it was not. I thought the glucose level was important because brain tissue consumes glucose when it activates. I thought this was the reason why they check glucose level, which was not correct. The glucose level was monitored for checking if the patient has bacteria infection because bacteria usually consume glucose to proliferate themselves. Glucose consume by brain activation was not in the same scale as bacteria infection. Asking questions was also good conversation starter. In this way, I’ve been getting familiar with ICU.