Pediatrics Pluses
Busy learning Peds, which I’m really enjoying. A quick eval, starting with the pros:
- The people–doctors, nurses–are just nice. You don’t realize how not nice some people are on other services until you do Peds.
- Your patients are for the most part, cute.
- Kids are resilient, and can make it through some really serious disease that would probably kill an older person.
- Most have reeaaally short Histories of Present Illness (2 days of decreased bottle intake and 1 day of cough), reeaaaally short Past Medical Histories (full-term baby) and usually are taking no meds.
- Peds is pretty straightforward. Kid is dehydrated and can’t keep food down? Give IV until kid can keep hydrated on liquids, then discharge.
- For the parentless hypochondriacs like myself, if you don’t already have any of the terrible pediatric diseases, you won’t have them.
- There are many pediatric specific diseases, but most of Peds is medical management.
- Kids have nice clean arteries and veins and organs, and for the most part haven’t screwed them up with alcohol and drugs and cigarettes. (I screw mine up, too, just like any other adult.)
- You throw antibiotics at everything.
The cons:
- Kids are germ factories, and you will get sick while you’re on service. I can’t count how many times a patient has coughed right in my face.
- If they’re young, they can’t tell you what’s wrong with them, or what hurts.
- One word: parents. I’m astounded at how different parents can react to certain degrees of medical illness. Some parents are great, others need to chill out and/or stop coddling their children. (Yes, I know people have different styles, yes, I know you have to work with the parent where they’re at.) It just seems like too many parents want their kids to be their friend, when the kid needs a parent, not another friend.
- For the parent hypochondriacs, your kid could have or get any of the terrible pediatric diseases.
- It’s hard to get IVs.
- You see a whole lot of kids with congenital or lifelong diseases that have no treatment.
- It sucks making babies cry.
- It sucks having to calculate drug doses and fluids by kilogram.
- There’s a lot of turnover, so you honestly can’t remember a kid you discharged 2 days ago.
- You throw antibiotics at everything.
I can totally agree with you about kids being “germ factories”. In my entire medical clerkship life, I’ve surprisingly stayed relatively healthy and haven’t had any absence/s due to sickness — that is, until I got into my Pediatrics rotation. I got the flu and had to take 2 days off from work. Still, I do miss the cuties — well, maybe except for the whiney ones.. hehe.
As an old teacher, I can assure you that it’s not just the hospitalized kids that are walking pest-houses. Every teacher soon learns to brace themselves for the rhinovirus onsolught every Fall. Flu shots may help – but not much. I actually managed to catch chickenpox at age 29!
I ended up working in NICUs and PICUs after realizing that when a kid cries, there’s a reason and I can totally deal with it. When adults whine I want to slap them. Resistance builds, so the germ factory-ness of it all decreases with time. The little ones are completely worth it. Making kids cry does suck, but hugging them out of it doesn’t suck at all. Good luck with the rest of peds. I miss it.
Nice post!
I miss the kids…they will tell it like it really is-even the ones that threaten to turn you in to child services for hurting them! I always really appreciated nurses who knew how to properly hold a child’s arm still for needle insertion. It makes an amazing difference in the amount of trauma a child goes through. Hope your ped rotation keeps on being pleasurable for you.
Don’t like getting sick? Don’t do this for a living, man.
For the last 6 years I’ve been sick on average once every 3 weeks.
You do the math.
best,
Flea
Hey Graham, I loved peds too, but in my two month rotation in med school, I ended up getting full blown influenza followed by pertussis. I never knew what a “whoop” sounded like until then. –walter :)