The Screaming Little Girl

Well today I admitted my first patient onto the unit. I think if I was writing about something else less serious I'd be wishing I had something more interesting to write about, something more eventful, but since I'm writing about little babies, I'm more than satisfied that this little girl had an uneventful birth, although it looks like she has genetic disorder, that's gonna make her bones pretty fragile. She's gotta a long road ahead of her and a lot of pain. It's crazy that I see the number of bone fractures she had and think the birth went well, but there are so many worse ways to start out, some don't really even get much of chance. Honestly it's hard to say who has it worse or whether they even notice that they have a decrease in quality of life, that stuff is better relegated to the ethics books and politicians, what I can say is that others way of life makes me cringe more than others. I remember in medical school a little cute 3 year old girl screaming, it was the first night I worked a pediatrics call. I came down into the ED and saw her covered in small 1cm size boils covering the left side of her face and head, her chest, back, and most of both arms. She was having a reaction to Herpes Simplex Virus, a virus that in you and me would cause "cold sores" or "fever blisters" on the lips. She had a rare T-cell deficiency, a cell type that among other things kills cells that have virus in them. So she can't make these, so the virus runs rampant. To make things worse HSV is something that never leaves your body, which is why you and I will get cold sores over and over again. We get sick and our immune system isn't strong enough to keep it dormant in the body, so out pops another cold sore. Except with this little girl, this was her cold sore, and to some degree or another, this would happen again and again. Not to mention the other pains that a T-cell deficiency would cause her. Depending on how bad this genetic disorder is with the little baby I just admitted it could be that painful for her as well. But it doesn't matter, that first experience with that little girl screaming terrified me. But it's also why I'm a pediatrician, but that's a whole other can of worms and I'm tired.

Newbie-Doc