The Unit

I'm currently on my first ICU rotation this year, and it's really tough. I'm in the medical ICU at Stanford and our team has anywhere from 15 to 25 patients. The disease states vary widely; while we have typical diseases in the ICU like septic shock, respiratory failure, and post-neurosurgery patients, we also have a couple rarer entities like Guillain-Barre syndrome, myasthenia gravis, and tumor lysis syndrome. The patient population can be really sick; we have patients who've had multiple transplants or who are being evaluated for transplant. We have patients who have had neurologic catastrophes and overwhelming strokes transferred for neurosurgery. It's a busy service. There are two teams with 5 residents each and a few fellows, but even with this sizable group, we are hard-pressed to keep on top of everything. Call is every 4 or 5 days and absolutely exhausting. Even on non-call days, we work pretty late to help the call resident out. In any case, I will write about a few interesting patients and interactions, but a dearth in blogs is simply indicative of the busyness of the service.