On May 6th I was supposed to finish my last final in vet school ever. I would have a quick celebration with my friends and classmates, go to bed, and wake up early the next day to start my first clinical rotation on ICU. In the midst of the current pandemic, this did not happen. Instead, I had a couple days to “relax” (which is hard to do with two kids at home), and then on Monday we began our journey into online clinical rotations. We were able to pick from a decent sized list, online rotations we would like to take, or we had the option of doing externships or taking vacation time. I chose to do online rotations for 8 weeks. I was able to pick from the list, (almost) all the rotations that I would have taken if we were on our normal schedule. My journey started with ICU-ER. Our time was spent every afternoon, Monday through Friday, meeting to round on certain topics. If you aren’t familiar with the term, “rounds” is the word used to describe going through a patient’s medical cases. This can also include different topics and we had in depth discussions about shock and triage, neurological disease, respiratory distress, trauma, toxicities, and other common emergency presentations. Even though I wasn’t in the emergency room getting my hands physically on these patients, I did learn a ton of information that I will be able to put to use in just a few short weeks. I was able to practice medical math calculations (yes—math is super important!), assess a patient’s stability given vitals and blood work, and I was able to come up with diagnostic and treatment options when given real life cases. It was great practice and after going through 10 individual cases, I feel more confident that once we are back in the hospital and I get into the ICU, I will be well prepared to handle these cases and effectively develop a plan for the patients.
