intensive care Archives - The Zinn Diaries

Why Nurses Should Never Stop Learning – My Favorite ICU Resources!

November 25, 2022 No Comments

I am passionate about education in ALL forms, regardless of your profession or lifestyle. Excellent nursing demands constant learning, and it’s essential for the ICU. After about a year of nursing, I noticed that I hit a lull; I was still learning something every shift, but the constant stream of information that I was used to had started to slow. This girl was hungry for knowledge and eager to do anything it took to build my nursing confidence! Over the next few years, I began working through every resource I could get my hands on. I’ve compiled my favorite ICU nurse resources for your browsing pleasure! Check out the detailed list below!

#1: Straight A Nursing

The Straight A Nursing podcast is designed to cover an extensive range of nursing subjects, from OB to ER to ICU. It discusses specific diagnoses (using the author’s original LATTE method), current events in the nursing world, tips for studying for the NCLEX and managing your first year as a new grad. This podcast is a great resource regardless of nursing specialty and remains a good review even as an experienced nurse!

Created by “Nurse Mo,” the Straight A Nursing website also has a blog, online review courses, and study guides for new grads. She’s even in the process of creating a study app for nursing students! Mo has her master’s degree in nursing education and has years of experience in the ICU setting. Even experienced nurses will benefit from her website and podcast. I enjoy listening to her podcasts while folding laundry, commuting between travel assignments, etc. Mo has organized her podcasts into playlists to help you find the episodes that are most relevant for your nursing experience. Her podcast is my FAVORITE resource, hands down!

You can listen to her podcast for free on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and Sticher. She has 265 podcast episodes uploaded on Apple Podcasts, and I’ve listened to 241 of them!

Note: Straight A Nursing’s paid products are currently 20% off for Black Friday 2022!

My top 5 favorite Straight A Nursing episodes:

#2: FreshRN

Another incredible podcast is FreshRN by Kati Kleber, an award-winning nurse educator and experienced critical care nurse. Kati designed her podcast for new grad nurses, especially in their first year, but any ICU nurse looking to grow their knowledge could benefit from FreshRN. Kati specialized in neuro ICU, so lots of her episodes reflect that knowledge. The FreshRN podcasts provide fantastic well-rounded tips for new grad ICU nurses in their first year. Kati also teaches various online courses via her website; options include “Charge Nurse Jumpstart,” “ICU Drips for Beginners,” “ECG Mastery,” and more! She has written five books (available on her website here).

You can find her podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, and iHeartRadio. She has 88 episodes uploaded, and her full list can be viewed here!

My top 3 recommended FreshRN episodes:

Tips for New Grads in the ICU
Intensive Care Devices (Part One and Part Two)
How to Study for the CCRN

#3: ICU Advantage

Originally started as a YouTube channel, the ICU Advantage website is the brainchild of Eddie Watson, a 10-year RN and Army veteran. His YouTube channel has over 14 million views and is a treasure trove of professional lectures that dive deep into critical care nursing, respiratory care, and pharmacology. ICU Advantage’s videos are designed specifically for ICU practitioners, so experienced nurses can easily find new information in his playlists.

Eddie teaches viewers about pulmonary artery catheters (Swan-Ganz), intraabdominal pressure monitoring, vent modes, CRRT, and more! You can find information about almost any ICU device on his channel, no matter how specialized. His lessons on hemodynamics and shock were vital to my success on the CCRN exam! If you are an experienced ICU nurse or find the previous podcasts too easy, the ICU Advantage channel is the place to go. His ICU nurse resources are unmatched. Click the images below to check out some of Eddie’s lessons!

#4 Core IM Podcast

The Core IM podcast focuses on putting complex internal medicine topics into digestible formats. It is run by doctors and medical students across the country, and they take turns teaching on topics that they are interested in! These podcast episodes are VERY thorough and require a certain level of medical knowledge beforehand. Personally, I find them most helpful to listen to after I had a shift with a similar patient diagnosis. If I had a patient in HIT (heparin-induced thrombocytopenia), I might listen to Core IM’s podcast lesson on my way home!

Their podcasts are organized by series on the website. They have categories such as 5 Pearls, At The Bedside, Hoofbeats, and Mind The Gap! The 5 Pearls category is my favorite because it breaks a diagnosis down into 5 clinical “pearls” that you should remember. The creators intentionally slow down during difficult sections, use purposeful repetition for emphasis, and offer quiz questions throughout each podcast. Each episode has show notes with helpful images and a written breakdown of the lecture!

Note: The Core IM podcast is designed for medical residents, NOT primarily nurses. However, nurses at an advanced level or who have worked through the above resources would find value in this content. ICU nurses might find this resource more helpful than other specialties. Some of the episodes are too challenging for my level, so I attached my favorites below! I listen to their podcasts on iTunes and Spotify.

If you want more ICU nurse resources, check out my article, “3 Practical Ways to Care for Yourself as a Travel Nurse!”

The Nurse That COVID Made Me

August 3, 2022 1 Comment

My name is Skyler Zinn and I was born as a nurse into the COVID-19 pandemic.

I graduated from nursing school in December 2019, ready to take on the busy intensive care unit where I had worked as a nurse aide for two years while finishing school. I chose the nurse who I wanted to train me; a friendly guy named Jason who was smart yet still funny. He was nice to everyone and the critical, dying, hard patients were given to him because he could handle it. I wanted those patients, too. I wanted to be trusted to be a competent, efficient nurse who could save lives and manage stress, just like Jason could.

Eventually, I wished that I wasn’t that nurse.

I began orientation the week before Christmas and could not be more excited to switch from nurse aide green to those royal blue “official” nurse scrubs. Even though I was extremely nervous, I followed Jason like one of the brand-new interns from Grey’s Anatomy; I watched, took notes, asked questions, and probably drove him crazy. I passed my NCLEX licensure exam on January 24th, 2020 and became a registered nurse. I got that bright red “RN” badge and continued my 12-week training to become an ICU nurse.

Our state shut down on March 21st, 2020.

COVID shut down all normalcy. Suddenly, nurses in the hospital started cross-training for other roles. ICU became filled with orthopedic nurses, surgical nurses, and labor/delivery nurses who had been yanked from their comfort zone and landed in our noisy critical care environment. These nurses were rockstars, and those first months were made immeasurably better with their support.

Unfortunately, as they helped with our patients upstairs, we were put on a rotation to help in the outpatient surgery area on the ground floor, aka “the dungeon.” No windows, one door, and tiny rooms only meant to hold a surgical stretcher. Our nurse directors and administrators were tasked with building a brand-new COVID unit with air filtration and creating policies with no pre-existing government guidelines. They brainstormed ways to get supplies in/out of rooms safely and stocked critical meds that had never been needed before. Our building maintenance team even built new doors and walls to make the existing unit safe for COVID patients. Respiratory therapists prepped ventilators and other oxygen devices so that we would have equipment on hand.

All of us were faced with an unknown future and the fear of bringing disease home to our families. We showered in the abandoned psych ward rooms on the top floor of the hospital after our shifts. After shift change, you could see rows of hospital staff changing their shoes in the trunks of their cars in the parking lot. Tiptoeing into the house naked after leaving our “hospital clothes” in the garage became the norm, even though we had just put them on in the psych ward!

My friends and I finished ICU orientation just weeks after the state closed and were launched into the madness along with long-term experienced nurses. I was pushed to learn how to put COVID patients on life support as efficiently as possible, how to titrate multiple medications at the same time, and how to run a code in a tiny patient room that wasn’t big enough to hold all our equipment. We had to learn fast because our patients could crash on us rapidly. I felt supported by my managers to safely improve my skills, and we all worked together to keep our community alive. Restaurants brought us food to eat (can’t go to the cafeteria in COVID scrubs!). Patients’ families sent individually wrapped snacks and sodas to get us through because we often didn’t have time to sit for lunch breaks. Nurses helped other nurses and critical patients were a team effort.

I watched a lot of people die. I have seen things I don’t want to remember. I’ve heard things that I pray never to hear again. But the privilege of being able to be there at someone’s last moment, even as we did everything we could to keep them alive, was an honor that I never want to forget.

Nurses stepped up during the pandemic. Even when our families argued about wearing masks at Walmart, we gowned up under layers of protective gear and worked countless hours to keep high-risk patients in our community alive. Now that the pandemic is “over” and normal ICU life has resumed, we reminisce around nurses’ stations with a mix of dread and nostalgia. Those years changed the healthcare world permanently and have shined a light on how important nurses are.

Even though being born into fire hurt like hell, I’m proud of the nurse that COVID made me.

For more details about what life has been since COVID “ended,” click here.

Skyler in PAPR
Danielle in PAPR
Astrid in Bunny Suit
Shannon in PPE
Skyler in Bunny Suit
Skyler with N95 unicorn mask
Shannon with her mom in COVID ICU