No really exciting stories from yesterday--it's actually kind of odd, but without a particularly interesting or different patient, now that I've sort of hit a stride and gotten used to the routine of things, a lot of my patients seem to blend together by the time I get home and it becomes difficult to recall exactly what I did during the day. The "different" patient yesterday was a 9 month old baby who was born at 23 weeks gestational age (note: 24 weeks is considered to be the threshold of viability...and even then, only about 5% of babies born that early survive). She's still on oxygen and has lots of lung troubles--like lots of preemies--but it was amazing to see a kid that used to be less than a pound, who lived in an incubator for a long, long time with skin so fragile you could barely touch it, doing so amazingly well that she could show up to my office and look pretty much like any other baby. Things like that make medicine pretty darn awesome. The rest of the day was mainly spent doing well-child check-ups.
The one other thing that did stand out about yesterday was the fact that another one of the doctors told me I was doing a good job (even better than some of the third years), and that if I was interested in peds he thought I would make a fine pediatrics resident. Nothing like a shot to the ego, but in all seriousness it did make my day and get me out of the rather bored "i've only seen one patient all afternoon" slump I was in at the time. And then I got to go talk to two sisters in for their check-ups who were actually lovely and polite and mom was great and they had some issues but were working on them and doing well. Those are the patients that make the annoying, awful parents totally worth working through and forgetting.
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