A week of ICU...

After finishing a week of ICU, I am utterly exhausted! Starting last Monday and ending yesterday, I had to complete 7 days of ICU. For the first few days, we had constant monitors where someone had to be down in the ICU ward constantly to monitor the patients. After Wednesday, ICU was quiet and we had to treat patients in the surgery wards and walk all of the dogs. On Friday, a greyhound with an open distal tibial fracture came in as an emergency at around 1am. I chose to take the case as you all know me and orthopaedics! I was quite excited about the case. When they came in, the referring vet had put on a splint that was not very good at all. The blood from the open fracture site had been tracking down the splint and the dog was leaving a trail of blood all over the floor and my pants. We took the dog to the treatment room and placed an IV catheter and administered morphine ASAP. We moved the dog to anaesthesia where we anaesthetized the dog with propofol. Once intubated and stabilized we moved to radiology and took several radiographs. The fracture was a comminuted fracture of the distal diaphysis of the tibia. Supposedly there was involvement with the articular surface as fissures had formed distally from the fracture site. We put a splint on temporarily until the next morning when the surgery would take place. Well, we came down the next afternoon and they had amputated the dog's leg! Apparently it was going to cost the owner about £6,000 and they simply couldn't afford it. So the dog was on ICU all weekend and the weekends require 24 hours a day monitoring/treatment. So the four of us split the days into two 8-hour shifts with two of us on each shift so that we could get some sort of sleep. I tell you what, the entire week was such a shock to my body for sleep and diet that I felt horrible! Every other day my sleep cycle would alternate from sleeping in the morning to sleeping at night. I am so glad ICU is over...for now until my actual ICU rotation begins, which is 3 weeks long! The week I just did was just for completing my EMS weeks. It was a week of basically seeing how little sleep you could get whilst still trying to maintain a functional mental state and staying alert in case there were emergencies.