Much happened in February--so much, in fact, that there was hardly time to process it, let alone to write about it. I worked on a wonderful inpatient team at our local children's hospital, trying very hard to impress people in my chosen field because I hope, next year at this time, to match here for my residency training. It being winter, we were incredibly busy around the hospital, with record numbers of kids admitted, at one point so many patients hanging out in the ER waiting for beds in the regular hospital wards that they had to set up a tent outside to act as a temporary ER because there wasn't enough space otherwise. But yet even with all that going on there were all long call nights where my team sat around in the doctors' lounge watching TV and waiting for many hours to be paged with the news of a new patient who needed to be admitted to our service. Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait.
As students, we were only allowed to work with patients who were admitted to the hospitalist team--and usually about half of the patients in the hospital at any moment were that, with the other half being admitted to private physicians who came and saw their own kids at the hospital, or were admitted to other specific teams (things like neurology, or GI, or pulmonology). So some days I would have 3 patients to see in the morning, but on some days we would only have 1, or even none, depending on how quickly we were able to discharge people. It made for a very interesting month.
I saw a lot of babies with bronchiolitis and young kids with asthma, exacerbated by whatever recent virus they happened to have picked up recently. A lot of people consider that to be boring, seeing the same thing over and over again without a lot of thinking involved. I was worried, myself, that that might be the case, but the great thing about kids and children's medicine is that there's a lot of turnover--as opposed to adult medicine, where the patients might linger for days, long after you've diagnosed the problem, waiting on lab tests or simply just not getting better, kids tend to heal quickly and leave the hospital just in time to make room for another kid. And even if that other kid has the same diagnosis, they are inherently different and have some other background story and/or cute little characteristics that make it worthwhile to hang out with them and their family, even if all that's wrong with them is the massive amount of snot hanging out in their lungs.
We saw other things, too--babies with jaundice who got put under lights for a few days, a baby with laryngomalacia who was really noisy when he breathed and made his parents (and us) really worried for a while, a teenager with mono that swelled her tonsils to the point of shutting off her airway.
All in all, it was a wonderful month, and very much affirmed my choice of pediatrics for my future career. Unfortunately, now I have been thrown headfirst into the midst of surgery, the most daunting rotation of med school, and have 7 more weeks to survive before I can catch my breath again. Wish me luck.
