This Won't Hurt a Bit by Michelle Au

Author:Michelle Au [Au, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446574419
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5. TRANSITIONS

A Change in Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

I RONICALLY, AT ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME that I find out that I am going to have a child of my own, I am making the final moves toward leaving the field of pediatric medicine entirely.

I was about halfway through my first year of Pediatrics residency when I started to get a sneaking suspicion that I had made the wrong decision by going into pediatrics in the first place. It wasn’t that I didn’t like pediatric patients—I did, and in fact, the idea of taking care of adult patients filled me with a sort of primitive dread. (The body hair! The smells! The yellowed, curling toenails! The general lack of mitigating cuteness!) It wasn’t that I didn’t like my colleagues—far the opposite, in fact; pediatricians as a whole are some of the nicest doctors you’ll ever meet, with a natural nurturing sensibility and a tendency toward squeals and spontaneous hugging. And it wasn’t that I didn’t like the medicine—pediatric pathophysiology was in my opinion far more interesting than what I saw during my rotations in adult medicine, particularly with the range of disease processes we got to see at Columbia, the top center of academic pediatrics in the city. It was just that in those long, dark winter months, after Christmas and before it seems like the sun will ever shine again, I started to get this uncomfortable, niggling sense that this is not what I am supposed to be doing with my life.

I admit that part of it was flu season. As sort of an annual tradition, like some sort of electronic harbinger of doom, the children’s hospital would send out an e-mail to all staff around late October or early November, heralding the first diagnosed case of influenza in the hospital. Cut through all the administrative admonitions for staff to get their flu shots and the usual epidemiological details about viral strains, and this e-mail in effect amounted to an alarm to BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES, FLU SEASON IS HERE. And so for the next five months, the Pediatrics staff was essentially under siege, the ER overflowing with vomiting, coughing, crying children; clinic waiting rooms filled to capacity with walk-in patients; with most of the residents, our puny immune systems rendered insensible with fatigue, no match for the virulent and often projectile nature of these bugs. War is hell, but flu season in a Pediatrics hospital should at least count as one of the outer circles of Dante’s inferno.

I can deal with flu season in and of itself—after all, getting sick while working with children is to be expected, and I don’t mind sick children or their parents as a rule. It’s just the tedium of the day-today, seeing the same few things over and over and over again, repeating the catechism fluids, bland diet, Tylenol until the process of seeing patients starts to feel more like working on an assembly line than practicing medicine. I

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