Critical care class, weeks 1 & 2

This summer my world was all about the social life. It's fall again, and focus is back on work. Quite a lot goin on at the moment.

Critical care class is going fine. I'm with six others: an pediatric OR RN with 5 yrs experience there, an oncology RN (brand new OCN) with eight? years experience, a med-surg RN with two years behind her, an ortho RN with 8 years ortho/med-surg behind him, and two new grads.

Love hemodynamics. LOVE IT. It's new stuff to me, and I'm getting it and my brain is actually working again! Love it! Twelve lead stuff, too...it's not new, but my understanding of it's always been superficial. I'm getting some more depth to that, and that's fun, too. There's a lot to 12lead, so I'm looking forward to taking the class proper. This is the good stuff about CCclass.

However. Because we have to start as if everybody's a new grad, I'm bored half the time. I've had so many people tell me how ass-kicking this class is....and I really shouldn't be this cocky halfway through. I'm just used to measuring troponins and know the heparin nomogram, and know what adventitious heart sounds are. That kind of stuff.

I'm not always at the top of my game. Doing the drip calculations my instructor's way caused me great pain. She uses something she calls "a magic number" to calculate drip rates and she is unable to do the calculations the long way. The ortho RN and I both needed it proved to us, so we put our heads together and over a period of two hours, figured out why the shortcut works. Others in the class just accepted the shortcut and were okay saying that they use a "magic number" to calculate a lifesaving drug drip factor for a critically ill patient. My father is an engineer. Math is NOT MAGIC.

I'm anticipating that once we're out of cardiac and into other body systems, I'll be working harder. There is SO MUCH that I don't know about ICU nursing, and my critical care class should be harder on me than it is so far. In a real ICU, I would get my ass handed to me and I know it. I'm a little nervous that I'm not worrying yet in this class. Again, maybe I'm being cocky and on the exam, I will get my ass handed to me.

But certain comments my instructor makes give me pause. Me, "Instructorperson, will we be going through the clotting cascade and stuff when we do livers? I don't know a lot of that stuff." "Yes, we'll be going through that when we do DIC. Probably not deeply enough for you, but we will be going through it." And what is that supposed to mean "not enough for me"? I'm sorry, am I bugging you?