This week has been exhausting.

In the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit I worked pretty hard at evaluating and consulting with the teams working on babies; I would be assigned up to three "pods" which is a fun way of saying "hallways".  Each pod has 6 rooms so I could be assigned 18 patients, with acuity in mind (...of course).  In the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit I am way busier.  I was only assigned 6 patients to "start me off" but 5 of them were being mechanically ventilated and  all of them required therapies.  I had hyperinflation therapy (HIT) on all 5 every 4 hours with an intermittent-percussive-ventilation therapy (IPV) on one of them every 4 hours.  Along with general evaluations, answering questions for nurses and families, and running blood-analysis.  The latter was probably one of the most annoying and time consuming parts of my day.  The respiratory department at this particular hospital is not allowed, isn't given the responsibility of actually drawing the blood, but we are required to analyze it.  I loathe mindless task-oriented "technician" types of things, but there really is an issue of consistency at stake when we are required to plug blood into a machine but we have no idea what has happened to the blood before it got to us.

The partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere is .28(ish) and O2 in atmosphere is 160(ish).  When those two values are some of the more important things we're measuring, its not really okay to let blood touch air very much.  I am getting syringes with an entire milliliter of air sitting in a cup of ice for who even knows how long.
Not to mention I have been told "capillary gas is not relative to arterial gas" hundreds of times by other RTs to whom I reply "If the capillary pO2 is 0, would you consider it to be irrelevant?"

Anyway, I digress.

The conditions of the kids in the PICU and the PCVICU are way different than the NICU, its almost like the "If its not congenital, it comes here!" catch-all type of place.  Maybe my problem is time-management, I admittedly suck at that and I have not made a lot of progress in the 2 years during clinical or in the 5 months since I have been practicing.  So maybe that will get better.  So far though, I miss the Pediatric ER and the NICU the most.

Addendum to the Medbuntu concept:
I think that Medbuntu could operate a lot thinner than I even suggested in the first place.  Medbuntu would be the ultra-thin OS that ran apps if it absolutely had to, but running every single other thing through the google-chrome (or modified firefox) would be pretty hot.  With a really cleverly designed "chart" with intuitive designs to make it easy for practitioners to know whats going on and see things that the previous clinician may have forgotten to tell them.