My visit to the ICU

I had the pleasure of shadowing my sister-in-law Rachel at her job in the ICU at Georgtown University Hospital on Monday. It was such a great experience. As a first year nursing student I must say that a lot of the nurses that I have seen at clinicals have not been very inspiring. A lot of them complained about their jobs and spent a lot more time eating and talking then taking care of their patients. But being at GUH was so different. The nurses actually seemed to like their jobs! Not only that but working with Rachel was sooo great!

When I met Rachel before her and my brother Jeremy were married she was still in nursing school at GU, and I was struggling with whether or not I should try to go back to school for nursing. Rachel was a vital instrument that God used to encourage me to to go back to school, and here I am now! So needless to say I look up to her and respect her a lot.

We had 2 patients, one who was very sick and the other who was not quite as sick. It was really neat to see Rachel's care for her patients, her dilligence in the many different tasks she is responsible for, and how much she knows about nursing. We had some really funny experiences, a few that involved cleaning up not so pleasent "body excretions" to put it nicely (no Jeremy this isn't what we did all day), and another that involved one of the patients funny hand motions that he used when he wanted more pain medicine. Oh and not the mention the patient who didn't want to go to the bathroom (were not talkin about number 1 here folks) so he kept trying to hold it...and well lets just say Rachel snuck in 2 doses of lactulose and he didn't have much choice!

Either way it was a really fun day and made me think more about potentially working in the ICU for my first few years.

Thanks Rachel for letting me tag along with you all day. I respect you so much, and hope to be like you as a nurse one day!