Blessings and frustrations

Just read some posts from a friend of mine who's currently serving overseas.  Sara, I have no idea if you read this, but we are blessed beyond all measure to have people like you defending us.  I don't know how you guys manage to do what you do, but I can't tell you how grateful I am to have you and so many soldiers like you undertaking something that I could never have the courage to pursue.  Keep your chin up, keep your head down, keep doing the right thing, and know that you and all your soldiers are in my prayers and the prayers of a grateful nation.

On the medical front, things are pretty quiet at the moment.  Students don't get a lot of responsibility on the neuro rotation, and that's kind of frustrating, but it can also be a blessing sometimes -- no hanging around for 5 hours after a shift to write 7 or 8 notes.  It's also a little tough because so many of the cases we see are things we can't do a lot about -- like the little girl with HSV encephalitis who's had much of her brain wrecked by the virus and will likely be neurologically devastated.  The saddest part?  It's possible that this could have been prevented.  Sounds like she had a suspicious lesion on her head at one point that suggested the possibility of HSV, but a pediatrician somewhere either missed or misdiagnosed it.  This really scares me -- if an experienced pediatrician could miss something that led to disease of this magnitude, what mistakes might I make?  I can't even imagine how that doc must feel...one mistake, one small oversight, and a child's life is potentially ruined...not to mention that all the lives that doc has saved, all the kids he / she has made better, now essentially come to nothing.  Medicine sucks sometimes.

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of success stories in neurology -- everything is about damage control, about making things tolerable.  It's one of the hardest things to accept about this discipline and one of the major reasons I'll never specialize in it.  Fortunately, smarter people than I are working tirelessly to solve some of these problems, so maybe someday we'll have actual solutions rather than short-term patches.

Anyway, that's all for tonight.  Back Wednesday evening with more updates.  Till then, peace and God bless!

PS - Patriots 39 - Steelers 26.  Yessssss!! :-)