Only Once A Year

Happy Spring!!!


If you have rabbit ears that work better than ours you may have already seen this.

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/play.shtml?mea=221774

Public Service Announcement to all Parents...don't bring your kid to the Emergency Room

Unless of course your kid turns blue, does not wake up, gushes blood, needs stitches, ingests poison (call poison control first 1-800-222-1222 or on the way), falls several feet, gets hurt 100 or more miles away from your home or does something else that causes your heart to stop. The ER is not a good place to doctor your kid for colds (viruses), influenza, ear infections or chronic low grade things that you could wait to see your regular doctor for. Because the stuff is there they will use it: x-rays, cat scans, other people who are good with needles to stick your kid and draw blood. Why expose your kid to radiation for a cold or flu? And beacuse ER docs are just trying to do a good job in the world of medicine with no follow-up they will defer to antibiotics more often than a family doc or pedi might because they have better contact with you. So your kid might not really need a bacteriacidal agent and still get one. One day down the road they may get a more serious infection and need an antibiotic and it may be harder to find one that works because so many organisms are developing sneaky, witty, dammblasted resistence that is faster than we are because we have overtreated with the magical cillins, mycins and sporins at our disposal. Really, we don't even have to write the scrips anymore, just push a few buttons. I'll just briefly mention the cost thingy. I see a lot of financial waste with kids being treated for really, really, really non-emergent things in the ER. And this is coming from a member of the Green Party and if there was a Socialist Party in this country I would sign up in a tenth of a heartbeat. Single-payer I believe in thou.
I want to reiterate that I am a student and this post has not been evaluated by the AOA or the AMA and nothing I say should be taken as sound medical advice or doctoring know-how.
But this is my opinion. Next time stop and think, do I really need to take my kid to the ER for this? And if you have the luxury of stopping and thinking about it maybe you could just as well wait for your doc's office to be open.

Drugs...Bad

The ER is the wildcard of medicine. You never know what the day will bring. Some days are slow and you see a few of the regulars: shortness of breath, fever, cough, low back pain, dental pain. Some days are busy and full of the kinds of ailments that are served much more efficiently and holistically in the primary care provider's office. Some days brings horror.
I recently witnessed my first cocaine overdose. Hyperthermia, hypertension, tachycardia: the sympathomymetic toxidrome, the awful truth of what can happen to what is essentially a kid. It was difficult to watch a person who is in leathers with dilated pupils, appearing scared and basically unresponsive but it is even more difficult to see their parent when they come in the room and know that it was the coke and wonder why it had to happen to their kid.
There was not a whole lot we could do for this person but we did everything we could. People who were on call at home came in to the hospital. Other ER patients had to wait. Medicines, hopeful antidotes, lined the counter and waited for their turn to be injected into the veins of a person who is not really with us anymore, and likely will not return. The overdose was strong, it antagonized many of the interventions. Finally a call was made to move the patient to a bigger institution. Maybe they could help.
As financially inefficient as it is I would rather have a day full of ear infections, colds and low back pain than a coke overdose. That is something the world could do without.

Feverish Snowstorm

It is possible that the flu made it's way into our home this weekend. Yesterday Ms Perpetual Motion spent pretty much all day on the couch: napping, watching a movie and the most amazing part, just lying still. I am calling the sickness that gave her a fever a flu because I think it must have been to stop my girl in her tracks. The virus that set up shop was so powerful that it kept Ms PM from even wanting to participate in making cookies, with white chocolate chips. That is one superbug.
As the snow blew outside, Iris and I cuddled on the couch wrapped up in our fish print Mexican blanket that we purchased two Christmases ago when I had the flu on the beach in San Carlos, Mexico. A few sips of broth, orange juice and water was about all I could get into her. She didn't even want a whole white chocolate chip cookie that I had to make by myself. Her lungs sounded clear, her heart was beating fast and her little lips were cherry red and dry. She coughed off and on, said her throat hurt when she woke up and had a few sniffles.
I remember her very first fever. It was around Valentine's Day when she was 9 months old and we had just returned from a trip to visit friends (with sick kids) up the coast. Back then I had the medicinal power of breastmilk. I held her all night, alternating between the rocking chair and the couch. I watched her like a hawk because I didn't know what else to do. She slept most of the night, off and on. I slept a little of it off and on. She seems to have inherited her Daddy's knack for going to sleep when sick and waking up better.
This morning brought requests for water and giddy chatter. She hopped right up out of bed and sauntered downstairs ready to dive into the day. By mid-day she was hurling herself into the snow outside and crawling into her snowcave that she dug out of the gargantuan snowbank in our driveway.
The superbug had left, disgusted by a peacefully sleeping child. I just hope he or she or it does not decide to return and re-institute torture of a tired mama who sees "flu" like symptoms in the ER all day.