Medical ICU – Day 5

Coming back in from the weekend (thankfully they don’t make us go in on the weekends for ICU as a medical student) only one of my patients was still around while the other 2 were downgraded. Today I just picked up one of the patients who had been with us a while. And interesting, kind of mystery cases. He was initially brought to us in acute hypoxemic respiratory failure in the setting of a positive COVID test, though it sounds like initially they were thinking the pneumonia was secondary to an aspiration event as opposed to COVID because his imaging studies just did not look like COVID. So we had been treating him with antibiotics as well as completing a course of steroids for the COVID. He was looking a lot better from when I first saw him (on my first day of the rotation) but then this morning he took a turn and they had to re-intubate him, though we were not 100% sure why since we had been treating him for the most likely causes. Anyways I’m looking forward to digging into this case a bit more.