Elective Week!

This week is the last week of my clinical rotationnnn!! 

How crazy/awesome/scary is that!?

So, for my last week in clinical, I saved the best for last - my elective in the PICU. Now that I have successfully completed all of my rotations, I can easily say that this was/is my FAVORITE rotation. The diverse patient population in both disease-state and age of patients. 

Monday started off with a bang with a burn patient, which I haven't had experience with. Burn patients are such an interesting population in that their energy and protein requirements are one-of-a-kind, in that their SO high! It doesn't help that the burn patient that was admitted to the PICU is now also on ECMO, which is playing more with her nutritional requirements. Tomorrow she'll have an indirect calorimetry reading which will give us an exact look at how much energy she is burning. It also doesn't help that she might be put on CRRT, which will double her already sky-high protein requirements. This is the first patient that I may see exceed 4-5 grams of protein per kilogram! An average adult needs 0.8-1.0 grams per kilogram. 

Another interesting patient that we have right now is a little girl who has a mystery metabolic/genetic disorder that's directly related to nutrition somehow. We aren't sure if it's a glycogen disease, fat metabolism disorder, or something else crazy. This makes it really interesting for providing nutrition care because we aren't sure what type, if any, of formula we should provide and if we provide her needs from TPN, if we should include fat! I'll definitely keep you updated on that.

But what's better than being in the PICU!? Not a lot comes close, but I must say that my spring break next week gives the PICU some good competition. Unfortunately I won't be going on a trip anymore for various reasons, but I have lots of fun stuff planned which includes mounds of relaxation.

How many days until spring break? 3 full days.
How many days until this internship is done? 73