Feb 17, 2012
This week I returned to Hospital Del Nino. I’m working with one of the pulmonologists, Dra. Tejerina, who is outrageously awesome. She is the quintessential bubbly, personable, playful pediatrician, with apparent national recognition in her work with Downs Syndrome patients. Interestingly, I haven’t seen many pulmonary patients—we spent two days doing mostly well-child checks sprinkled with diarrhea, constipation, and fevers. Another day we had a Downs Syndrome clinic, and the other 2 days we rounded in the infectious disease ward. There were three kidos with TB, all with severe malnutrition and one in a coma with TB meningitis. This morning I was in clinic so I didn’t see it, but one of those girls died, I heard from sudden cardiac arrest. It’s crazy that these kids aren’t on continuous monitors – in the US they’d be in the ICU. I remember how her dad looked at her yesterday as he put a blanket over her toothpick legs. So sad.
On a lighter note, I had a great day in clinic. I brought a bunch of toys from the US – little things like Hot Wheels, jump ropes, sticky slappers and bubble blowers. It was too cute to see the change from sniffly cranky kiddo to giddy grinning toddler skipping around the room. One of the parents made the poor boy say gracias maybe 5 times… it’s amazing how such a small thing in the US could mean so much to the kids here. Also, at one point when we had a 5 month old crying unstoppably, my preceptor asked me to SING! Well, I thought, happy birthday in Spanish is pretty much all I’ve got. So I sang “A spoonful of sugar” from Mary Poppins and danced around, pretty sure this was hopeless. But all of the sudden she stopped crying and just stared at me! Haha whatever works!
No comments:
Post a Comment