Quickies: Children are Awesome, Long Hours, Going to LA

This has been an amazing week! Unfortunately, part of what made it amazing also made it extremely exhausting and left no time for a blog update. Therefore, since I today off in honor of our great country's independence, here are a few quickie updates for y'all!

1. Childrens Hospital Central California (CHCC) is AWESOME!
I am one week into my Pediatric core rotation at UCSF-Fresno. The set-up is we do three weeks in-patient at Childrens Hospital and then three weeks at Community Medical Center downtown for NICU, Nursery, and outpatient clinic. I have run into absolutely AMAZING people at CHCC! The doctors are phenomenal...and ALWAYS go out of their way to teach. Truly and truly I say to you, I have found the mecca of medical education. The Attendings will SEEK YOU OUT in order to give you the opportunity to do a procedure. They will walk you through it step-by-step, staying patient and making sure you learn it.

2. Long Hours in my First "Call"
We do "Call Q4" during the Peds rotation. What does that mean? Call means we stay late - when we are residents, it will mean 24-30 hours at the hospital. As medical students, it means we stay until around 10pm (remember, we start at 630am everyday). "Q4" means the 'dosing' - if I were to prescribe you Tylenol q6hrs it would mean you take a tablet every 6 hours. Q4 for call means I am on call every fourth day. So yesterday was my first call. I have already mentioned how awesome the Attendings are, so now let me lavish some praise on the RESIDENTS at this hospital. They are top-notch. They are kind, don't even know HOW to "scut" their med students with stupid busy work, and also go out of their way to teach! Dare I say, because of the culture and example set by the Attendings, the Residents step up their game and help create an amazing learning environment for all of us. During my call, I attended to all my assigned patients, visited some of the other cute kids in the various play areas in the hospital, and took care of some patients in the ER who needed our attention - like a 2 day old infant with suspected bacteremia (bacteria in the blood, which in such a young baby is really scary because unlike an adult who has a "blood brain barrier", a newborn doesn't have a very well developed BBB and can get meningitis REAL quick).

3. Going to LA
There's a BIRTHDAY party coming up for two amazing, awesome, hilarious sisters in LA. I'll be there...but they don't know that yet. Should be fun. AA and JC and I head down there in 15 minutes. I'm just that good that I studied this morning, got ready, packed, and wrote a blog entry before I leave. Gimme some sugaaah!