First time for everything

Ok, well not for being featured in Grand Rounds (it's my second time).

Two weeks ago I put in my first chest tube (and subsequently my first pneumothorax). Today I intubated for the first time.

The patient I intubated was a post-op heart surgery kid whom we had extubated earlier in the day. He has a history of not doing so well with extubations but we were hopeful. He started to crap out

Whirlwind update

A quick note on PJ:

I stopped on the heme/onc floor this morning to see how he's doing. He's like a different kid - his face isn't puffy and his belly is almost down to regular kid-size. He was sitting up in bed, eating chicken nuggets and fries, and directing his aunt where to hang up all the crafts he had done. One chest tube is out and the other one may come out tomorrow.

I talked to his

Whirlwind

For one of my families, this week was a crazy one.

PJ got admitted Thursday after his regular doctor noticed that his belly was rather large. Initially PJ's parents and doctor thought it was constipation but when his belly got bigger, his doc did an x-ray and saw that this was something worse than constipation.

PJ was scanned and found to have large bilateral pleural effusions and a mass

Bad case of the munchies

Apparently, Bush doesn't care about Black people OR children.

I'm not usually one for political overtones, but this is insanity. I'll give any one a shot, but I've been dismayed with this presidency since day one. Enough is enough. He's pissed because it "expands the focus of the program" beyond helping those kids below the poverty line. In my experience, it's not the kids that are below the

An anecdote

Odd anecdote...

I've noticed that kids with 9/11 as a birthday, who've been born on or since 9/11/01 have shite for life. All of the kids I've taken care of who've been born on 9/11 since 2001 have myriads of medical problems - MRCP, developmental delay, seizure disorders, weird metabolic problems, etc.

There's a kid right now with that birthday that I'm taking care of in the ICU (that I've

The good and the bad

Worked like a dog all weekend in the ER. When I'm on with our new attending JM, the floodgates of Hell open and my 10 hour shift inevitably stretches into a 12 hour shift. It's like the world knows when we're working together.

My first of two ER months is done and now I'm in the PICU for the very first time. My first day/night/day in the PICU went a little something like this...

-0530: Alarm

Drinking saves lives

Just finished off night two of three in a row in the ER. I again had a slow night, seeing only five patients between 10 PM and 8 AM. I saw, in no particular order: viral URI, croup, seizure secondary to med underdosing (kid didn't like his Trileptal, kid took half of prescribed dose, kid had seizure; Q.E.D.), seasonal vs. environmental allergies, and umbilical hernia that didn't need anything