this time it's personal

Peds is over. I want more. It's not just the kids - the whole family gets involved and it's all such a warm fuzzy feeling. When kids get better, it feels like you're releasing such potential back into the world.

I had been following one notoriously difficult patient for several weeks on two different services (my team jokes that she "followed" me to my new service). She was constantly surly, listless, bitter, uncooperative with all of the nurses/doctors, her parents were impossible to track down to obtain consent, and to top it off, she was a medical enigma.

After 3 straight weeks of seeing her, barely making any progress (medically or otherwise), she was finally scheduled for a procedure on a day when her parents couldn't be there. She looked up at me, confessed she was scared, and shyly asked if I could go to the procedure with her and stay at her side until she "fell asleep" (from the anesthesia). I began to visit her more and more often outside of my required morning rounds. Our team ended up diagnosing her definitively, and I discharged her on the very last day of my peds clerkship. She was a completely changed person - smiling, energetic, relieved to know "what was wrong with her"... and thanked me for listening and being nice when no one else did.

I know it's cheesy, but I'm convinced there was some element of fate there... how else to explain her being on both of my services AND leaving exactly when I did? I'd like to think I made a difference in her life (and I do hope I did), but she definitely made a lasting impression on me. It's all too easy to become impersonal in this line of work.

Tomorrow I begin my first day of trauma surgery. On call, no less. So really it's my first two days, all wrapped up into one very long day-to-night-to-day.