I passed the CTICU test! At least I think I passed... they never actually told me one way or the other but I have started working on the floor full time. The past week I have worked night shifts and I was really nervous about that (lets be honest, I am nervous everyday. If I blank when I am asked questions at 3pm then what is gonna happen when my preceptor starts quizzing me at 3am?!?!) but it has actually been really good. Things tend to quiet down in the wee morning hours so that our patients can try to get some sleep - this is by no means a guarantee, some patients require just as much care to sustain them through the night as they do during the day, but on average there is less
elective stuff going on so it makes for a less hectic unit, which makes it a little easier to focus on learning the task at hand... and by the task at hand I mean EVERYTHING. Anyways, I am pretty tired all the time so switching my body clock over to sleeping during the day really hasn't been too hard. I actually feel like I am getting alot more accomplished when I am not at work because it is much easier to be motivated to study, run errands, cook, workout, etc. when you are off during daylight hours as opposed to when I work the day shift and I get off right as it is getting dark and all I want to do is veg out and go to sleep once I get home. Unfortunately, it turns out that our apartment becomes an oven as it sits in the sun all day (we have no A/C, only heat) which we hadn't really paid attention to so far because the weather has been quite mild, dropping into the 50's at night and getting up into the mid 70's during the day - so the gradual warming throughout the course of the day has gone unnoticed. But this weekend SoCal had a heat-wave. So here I am, fast asleep and we start topping out at about 90 degrees by 11am (which would put my room at a toasty 95) and I had gone to bed in flannel pants with flannel sheets and a comforter - to make a long story short, it felt like I had wet the bed by the time I woke up. Awesome. So today I took advantage of our newly warm weather and decided to sleep at the beach instead of in my room! I was not the only one with this idea so, in an attempt to escape the masses, I drove up the coast to El Matador beach in Malibu:
I didn't have my camera on me (only my phone) so you will have to excuse the blurry
pics.
I passed the CTICU test! At least I think I passed... they never actually told me one way or the other but I have started working on the floor full time. The past week I have worked night shifts and I was really nervous about that (lets be honest, I am nervous everyday. If I blank when I am asked questions at 3pm then what is gonna happen when my preceptor starts quizzing me at 3am?!?!) but it has actually been really good. Things tend to quiet down in the wee morning hours so that our patients can try to get some sleep - this is by no means a guarantee, some patients require just as much care to sustain them through the night as they do during the day, but on average there is less elective stuff going on so it makes for a less hectic unit, which makes it a little easier to focus on learning the task at hand... and by the task at hand I mean EVERYTHING. Anyways, I am pretty tired all the time so switching my body clock over to sleeping during the day really hasn't been too hard. I actually feel like I am getting alot more accomplished when I am not at work because it is much easier to be motivated to study, run errands, cook, workout, etc. when you are off during daylight hours as opposed to when I work the day shift and I get off right as it is getting dark and all I want to do is veg out and go to sleep once I get home. Unfortunately, it turns out that our apartment becomes an oven as it sits in the sun all day (we have no A/C, only heat) which we hadn't really paid attention to so far because the weather has been quite mild, dropping into the 50's at night and getting up into the mid 70's during the day - so the gradual warming throughout the course of the day has gone unnoticed. But this weekend SoCal had a heat-wave. So here I am, fast asleep and we start topping out at about 90 degrees by 11am (which would put my room at a toasty 95) and I had gone to bed in flannel pants with flannel sheets and a comforter - to make a long story short, it felt like I had wet the bed by the time I woke up. Awesome. So today I took advantage of our newly warm weather and decided to sleep at the beach instead of in my room! I was not the only one with this idea so, in an attempt to escape the masses, I drove up the coast to El Matador beach in Malibu:
I didn't have my camera on me (only my phone) so you will have to excuse the blurry pics.
No comments:
Post a Comment