Day 1

On June 9, 2009 I began my internship at Mount Sinai Medical Center. I had been placed to work in the Intensive Care Unit located on the sixth and seventh floors of the Greene building. After meeting my mentor, Nina Santos, and the majority of the ICU team, I was set to do paperwork. I was informed that the nurses were almost always short on patient application forms and so I began to assemble them. Each form contains intricate charts and checklists that the nurses need to document. These include:

* Patient diagnosis
* Nutrition
* Problem lists
* Interdisciplinary patient/family teaching
* Kardex,
* Admission medication reconciliation
* VTE Prophylaxis
* Vaccine screening
* Ventilator management
* Sedation protocol
* NCI Checklist
* Patient education/ acknowledgement for
o Stroke
o pneumonia
o CHF
o MI
o SCIP
* Patient belongings/valuables.

Here I am assembling the patient application forms.

Although making these forms was an imperative albeit mundane process I, unfortunately, got to witness my first DNR. As many know, the ICU is a unit in which extremely ill patients are placed and sorry to say, do not always survive. It was on my first day of internship that I witnessed a death. DNR stands for Do Not Recessitate. This means that the patient requested that if he or she were on the verge of death, no life support or medication was to be used that ensured physical stability. Later, the nurses wrapped the body up and transferred it out of the room while I continued to put together patient application forms. It surprised me how a death seemed so habitual. I guess after so many deaths, it becomes easier and easier to not feel anything.