Rounds in Different ICUs, and the Horrible Monster that Haunts My Dreams

Rounds in 3 ICUs

So far I have spent time in three different ICUs: neonatal, pediatric, and medical. The ways patients are handled in the NICU and PICU are different, though the underlying structure of each unit is very much the same. The kids in the PICU can potentially have a much wider range of problems than those in the NICU, such as developmental disabilities and cancer. One of the patients in isolation was thought to have tuberculosis, while a 1-year old girl was suffering from severe scoliosis. The way the units are organized, however, is quite similar. Going on rounds with Dr. Kutko and her team was reminiscent of Dr. Frayer's team: the morning was spent going to see each patient and occasionally meeting with a surgeon to discuss surgery.

The organization sort of fell apart when I went to the medical ICU. If I had to describe it in one word, it would be "chaotic."Prior to rounds, the residents and fellows meet to discuss each patient. I often heard talk about terminally ill patients, many of which have cancer. Once the rounds begin (which is usually never on schedule), we would meet Dr. Berlin. The conditions of the patients we would meet were generally much worse than anything I'd seen in the other ICUs, and each discussion would be more involved with much more data to consider. At times, Dr. Berlin had other obligations, so he would often leave us and let one of the fellows take charge. It was an interesting (and fast paced) experience, though somewhat depressing to think that some of the patients I saw may not have much longer.

Error Messages
I am trying to write a Matlab program that can generate a two-dimensional airway model of the lungs, turn it into a mesh, and then export it in a form that is readable by Fluent. Right now, the hard part is trying to make it readable. Trying to reverse engineering the Fluent .msh file format is proving to be the bane of my existence. Instead of showing results, I chose to show the error message that I keep getting and a picture of a monster. If the error message had a representative monster, this is what it would look like.