Today was my first day in the Pediatric ER, and I could use a hug (please don't actually hug me; I have someone for that and she's very good at it).
There were some tough cases today - cases that I'm not ready to share with the internet yet. Some of you may know that I used to work in an ICU back in California. Part of my job involved rotating through as a clerk in the pediatric ICU, and that's where you see some of the most heartwarming and heartbreaking stories in medicine. At the time, I feel like I had built up a sort of immunity to the emotional toll; I still felt for our patients (and there were still tears at the end of the day), but the impact was blunted. I wasn't quite ready to deal with that right out of the gate today, on day two of my Peds clerkship.
All of that aside, it is fun to be back in a medical hospital. I really enjoyed psych, but physical medicine (pediatric or not) really seems more my cup of tea.
TIL: A Wood's lamp, named for physicist Robert Wood, is the medical term for an ultraviolet (aka black) light. A common portable version is essentially two small black lights surrounding a magnifying glass used to look for corneal abrasions (eye scratches) as visualized by a fluorescent dye. The dye is a very subtle yellow under normal light, but under UV it glows very bright. If there is a scratch on the surface of the eye, you'd never be able to see it normally. But the dye is like glitter; it gets everywhere. Once you turn the Wood's lamp on, the scratch will show as a neon-yellow line on the surface of the eye.
No comments:
Post a Comment