Pediatrics

My pediatrics rotation started yesterday. Like our other core rotations, it is 6 weeks long. This week, I am getting a subspecialty experience with the pediatric gastroenterologists. Next week, I'll be in the newborn nursery. The third week, I will be doing shifts in the peds emergency room. Then I'll finish up with three weeks on the inpatient hospital service (back to every-fourth-night call).

Peds GI is actually going to be quite applicable to family practice, since in addition to seeing rarer diseases such as childhood-onset Crohn's (an inflammatory bowel disease), I'm seeing some basics such as constipation and diarrhea. I've also gotten to work with some teenagers, which is an age group I really enjoy.

The doctors have been very good preceptors, taking plenty of time to explain their thought processes to me and refer me to useful journal articles. There's a resident on the service who has also been great about showing me around and sharing the interesting cases!

I'm trying to stay active even though I'm back to a clinic schedule and it's getting really cold and dark outside! This morning, I was actually up at 5:30. I had a migraine last night, which doesn't happen too often, but when it does, the only thing that really works is to go to bed, so I was asleep around 9:00. Since I had some work I needed to do, but couldn't bear to look at a computer screen last night, I got up early this morning to get that stuff done. Then I took Jasper out for a run before Alex and I headed in for an 8:00 start.

Jasper and I just got back from our evening walk, a short but very active romp along the bike path. Once we let him off the leash now, he takes off like a shot, and loves to run circles around us while we chase him and play with him. Then we practice "sit" while he's all worked up. He's really doing well and is getting more and more responsive to us. His response to "come" has improved drastically in the last week or two, he's willing to approach head-on at a dead run as long as I'm squatting down. Standing up, it's still a little too intimidating, it seems!