It’s 3am. You wake up hot and clammy. A cactus withered and died in your mouth. Joints you never knew you had scream for WD-40. Breathing hurts. Blinking hurts. You can feel your fingernails growing, and that hurts. Did you get the flu? Zika? Are you patient zero for the latest emerging plague? You could go see a doctor, but you’re a graduate student with rudimentary health insurance whose coverage documentation you barely skimmed because c’mon, you’re young and healthy and you don’t plan on getting sick–no, you don’t plan on having time to get sick. Would a trip to the ED be covered? Does it have to be a certain ED? “Reply hazy; try again” is the best your fevered mind can muster. Can the Internet be your physician? “It is decidedly so.”
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health care
Babies and Bethlehem
Few things arouse human emotion as strongly as babies do. They are one of the few remaining cultural icons of innocence, operating with the simplest and purest of human feelings. They cry when upset, they sleep when content, and their waking activities revolve around eating, pooping, and discovering that they have arms and legs. A baby’s desires are not complex.
And yet, as any parent knows, this does not mean that caring for them is an equally simple task. In fact, the inverse is true; the more primitive and helpless a baby is, the more complex his or her surrounding world must become in order to support life. At this point in residency, I have watched over patients of all ages and types, and few patients in the hospital are as fragile as those in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. A single additional day of maturity, a few extra grams of weight, even the presence or absence of light can mean the difference between life, death, and permanent disability. Thousands of dollars are easily spent on the titration of medications or nutritional formula by milligrams and milliliters.
Why? Some of these extreme measures are driven by a sense of hope and potential. It reminded me of career advice from a former obstetric attending: [Read more…] about Babies and Bethlehem