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Nursing Student’s Clinical Experience in the Intensive Care Unit ICU in Nursing School

Here is my experience in the intensive care unit (ICU) as a  nursing student. Yesterday, I got to rotate in the ICU. Overall, I liked it but I don’t think that place is for me. The nurse I was with was once again great. I was shown everything and got to do a lot of stuff. 

Nursing Student Clinical Rotation in the ICU

What I really liked about the ICU was that the nurses only have 2 pts which is awesome compared to 6 to even 18 patients at a time and I am sure some nurses have more. What was crazy was that although my nurse only had two patients we stayed busy the whole time.

We have to get orders, collect for lab work, document (documenting in the ICU is a little more complicated than on a regular floor), monitor our unstable pt, and give meds. One of our pt just had open heart surgery the day before. She had a quintuple bypass. Well I figured that on post-opt day 1 a person who had this surgery would be in the bed knocked out on some killer pain meds.

Nope, she is in her chair, eating, ambulating twice a day, and on little pain meds. I asked my  nurse how this was and he explained that this is how it is with heart bypass and that if they want to heal and get the heart moving like it should they have the pt up and moving as much as they can.

I thought that was really neat! I got to give insulin twice (I love giving insulin), check blood sugars, and give Digoxin IV push. Digoxin is a pretty cool drug and it is a serious one. My pt who had the open heart surgery keep having high blood pressure, pulse rate, and on her telemetry monitoring showed she kept having atrial fibrillation (where the heart is beating irregularly) which is not good and we had given her several things to bring it down but it didn’t work. So the doctor gave an order for digoxin.

If you want to become an intensive care unit nurse (ICU nurse), the nursing salary is a little bit more than a regular floor nurse which is nice! I think they call it critical care pay.

Care of Adults Senior Semester Course

Once again mine has been busy but not as busy as last week. Sheew..I am glad that week is over. Let’s see…Monday was a loooong day. I had my care of adults class from 8:15am-12:15pm and she kept us the whole time. I really like her lectures (considering the time I am in there) because she pretty much tells you “star this it will be on the test”.

I LOVE that in a teacher hehe. It makes my life so much easier. I actually have a test next Monday in there. I have already started studying. My method for studying for tests is to do it a week ahead of time and only a week ahead of time. I found that if I do all the assigned readings for each week I forget what I read before the test and will have to end up doing it all over again to prepare for the test.

Plus it is a huge waste of time when you have other things to do and I usually make low to high 90’s on test so my method helps me. But everyone is different in learning!

Then after that I had my population nursing care class. I have to say I really don’t like that class. It’s one of those “project happy courses”. We have to do a huge project on our community and my partner and I decided to do a city in our area and our population is going to be the homeless.

We are going to concentrate on their basic first aid access. Next week we are going to go downtown and find some people who are homeless and talk to them. I think we are going to hit up the Salvation Army because they have a shelter where they can live until they get back on their feet.

 I think that population is interesting because you find some who have came from great backgrounds (have a ph.D, was married, made a decent income but got into drugs), the ones who just choose to live like that, and of course the ones who have no other choice.

When I use to think of homeless people I thought of a dirty person who was lazy that didn’t want to get a job. However, that is a huge stigma and it’s not true (yeah some are just that but not everyone).

I can’t wait for the weekend. My mom’s birthday is Saturday and I going to take her out to eat. We are going to get Chinese. I LOVE Chinese food, especially the buffets. Gosh I am getting hungry just thinking about it. Hopefully I can post some photos from that. Well everyone I hope you have a wonderful week!

Until next time.

Sarah 😉

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