UCLA - CTICU

Ahhhh I'm busy... our month of CardioThoracic Intensive Care Unit (CTICU) classes ends this week and I can't decide if I am more nervous or more excited about the prospect of finally working on the floor! I have worked three shifts on the unit so far but the vast majority of my (and the other new hires') time over the past month has been spent in lectures learning about what we can expect to see in our patient population on the unit and how we are expected to monitor and care for them. Our final exam is this Thursday: it is three hours long, it is all short answer/free response and we have to pass with a 90% to officially start working on the floor full time. One of the things they keep drilling into us is that you have to know and use your support system when you are on the floor because there are always going to be things that come up at work that scare/overwhelm you and getting help from your coworkers is the only way that you (and your patients) will survive! Today at the end of class they showed us this video from the CTICU's Christmas/holiday party this past December. It was made by the unit's 'Spirit and Enrichment Committee' and it chronicles the experience you have as a new hire in the CTICU. In the beginning of the video you see pictures of the last three or four new hire "classes" (I call them that for lack of a better term, they are the last three or four groups of nurses that went through orientation on the unit - we just took our picture today so we aren't in there yet!). Then you see us in class (look for the giant three-inch binders!), learning how to work different machines and taking the test. Then you get to see pictures of the unit, the current staff and the rooms, patients and some of the procedures. You see how we prep a room for a patient coming up from surgery, and all the different drips and monitors we have to manage... it is crazy, our patients are the sickest of the sick! Like I was saying before, they really stress how important it is for us to trust and rely on each other so the unit plans a lot of activities for us to do together outside of work (like have holiday parties), you get to see some of this at the end of the video. Anyways, I thought it was a good way to show you what I've been up to and to give you an idea of why I haven't been posting much lately ;)

Here is the video's description on YouTube: "Here at UCLA's Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit (CTICU), we take care of pre-op and post-op Adult Heart Transplants, Pediatric Heart Transplants, Bilateral Lung Transplants, Single Lung Transplants, Heart and Lung Transplants, Aneurysm Repair, Dissections, CABGs, Valves, Pediatric Congenitals such as Tetralogy of Fallot, Atresias, Single Ventricles, DORVs, Norwoods, Glenns, Transpositions, ECMO, Balloon Pumps, VADS, Thoratecs, Abiomeds, Heartmates... Life in the CTICU is fast-paced and never quite the same, but that's just the way we like it. We work hard and we work together as a team... we're a good group, dedicated to giving the highest quality care to our patients."