Sunday, April 02, 2006

Done with the PICU


I finished the PICU this week. My last night I was on call, a 30 hour shift, and I grabbed a photo of the skeleton crew on with me to share with you all. I like how Paul takes photos of stuff he is doing and gives a glimpse of what is going on with his life, even if just a snapshot, so I think it will be fun to do the same from time to time. I am somewhat limited from the best pics however, due to patient confidentiality and ethics.

The PICU, (pediatric intensive care unit), was a cool place to work for a month, but I am glad as hell to be done with it. The hours suck. If I were a single guy though, I would milk it, example: Buddy in front of random girls, "Travis tell me what you did today." Me, "Oh I helped saved dying babies lives".
In reality though, it is way different than ER medicine. We had kids with congenital defects not equivalent with life, but humans have figured out ways to give them surgery and save them. You could theorize that it goes against the whole darwinism concept, but some kids can grow up to be entirely normal otherwise. I had one baby, which I really wish I could show you the video I made of for our ER video library, that after surgery had its chest OPEN. I mean lying on the bed, literally with a 6 inch gap in the middle of its chest with a piece of sterile saran wrap over its heart. You could stand there and watch its heart beating. It has to stay open for a couple of days after the heart surgery, and then they can close it. Its straight mad scientist shit.
ok, i am going to bed. like joe horn says, walk easy.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kind of gives me a visual for "my heart goes out to you."

Paul said...

Good stuff!

brando said...

Wave of babies!

That's just a little teen girl squad going out there.

Seriously, if you ever get poison ivy all over your body, DON'T take a bath to "cook it out", like Travis told me to do. That was some really bad advice.

Paul said...

what's going on with the blonde in the back?

Anonymous said...

Was that picture taken at the end of your 30 hour shift? Because you kind of look like a corpse. Not that I blame you, if I worked a 30 hour shift I would actually be a corpse.

P.S. I'm going to start using that "saving babies' lives" line at bars... also I'm going to start going to bars.

Anonymous said...

Good job, Turkleton