On Sunday I had to go into the hospital for the the first part of the last 24 hour newborn call shift my program will ever have. They recently changed up the distribution and responsibilities of senior pediatric residents at my program. We used to have a rotating call pool that had to takeover the newborn nursery service a few weeknights for a month at a time and then work at least one weekend 24hr call shift, all while on another rotation on weekdays. Now, one of the inpatient senior residents will always take call overnight.
Anyways, I had to go in at 7am to round on a handful of babies with the attendings who were working that day. If, from 7am to 7am the next day, there were any calls on any of the ~30 babies (a very below average number), I got the page and either took care of the problem or asked the on-call attending for help. Was actually a pretty mild day/night. My biggest gripe is of being notified way after I should have been about a problem. I can't fix a problem I don't know about and sometimes I can no longer fix problems that I hear about too late.
SundayIL: Syndactyly, or webbed and conjoined fingers and toes, is surprisingly common. It's often easy to fix at a very early age, which is why you don;t see many adults walking around with double thick fingers or flipper feet. But what may not be obvious is that conjoined fingers are not caused by fingers getting stuck together in utero, but rather because a part of our embryonic flippers fail to separate.
There are numerous inheritable forms of syndactyly and it is associated with many different genetic syndromes. Without other findings, however, it's not really worth it ot do a big genetic work-up on a baby with a few conjoined toes and fingers. Have orthopedics fix them (or not) and just let them go along with their lives.
SundayIL: Syndactyly, or webbed and conjoined fingers and toes, is surprisingly common. It's often easy to fix at a very early age, which is why you don;t see many adults walking around with double thick fingers or flipper feet. But what may not be obvious is that conjoined fingers are not caused by fingers getting stuck together in utero, but rather because a part of our embryonic flippers fail to separate.
There are numerous inheritable forms of syndactyly and it is associated with many different genetic syndromes. Without other findings, however, it's not really worth it ot do a big genetic work-up on a baby with a few conjoined toes and fingers. Have orthopedics fix them (or not) and just let them go along with their lives.
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