Overheard today in the pediatric brain tumor clinic:
"Mom, I'm going to glue your mouth shut. Your eyes too."
- 9 year old boy with a relapsed medulloblastoma that had metastasized all over his brain, who now had right-sided weakness and looked plain tuckered out sitting in his chair, one hand on his IV stand, one hand playing Pac-Man. He was waiting to be admitted for a 5-day inpatient stay of hardcore, heavy-duty chemo.
"Owie. Owie. Owie."
- 12 month old girl with an optic pathway glioma as she saw the needle coming toward her to access the chemo port in her chest. Her dad tried to avert her attention with a Piglet stuffed toy.
"I just want to go to school and be with my friends."
- 11 year old girl with a non-germinoma germ cell tumor who is currently homebound after a recent hospitalization for swine flu and was in the outpatient clinic for cycle 5 of her chemo. We talked about Zac Efron and High School Musical. Yeah, I've got my ears to the streets, folks. I know what's hip.
"Owie. Owie. That's going to hurt."
- 3 year old bilingual girl with a diffuse intrinsic brainstem glioma. We ate Goldfish and played with toys on the floor of her room before the Benadryl knocked her out.
"Please take it out. PLEASE! PLEASE!"
-6 year old boy with a pilocytic astrocytoma that had wiped out the satiety control center in his hypothalamus so that he was now weighing in at well over 100 lbs
Lesson #1: It is never fun to hear a child whimper in pain and fear. Period.
My heart has been simultaneously breaking and singing this week. Oncology is hard. Pediatric oncology is harder.
Lesson #2: Kids are just kids, even if they are sick.
I coo at the babies and bounce them up and down. I talk about boys and clothes with my pre-teen girls. I even chatted about Nascar with one boy who had just recently met his hero, Tony Stewart, over the Labor Day weekend thanks to Make-A-Wish. Seeing as how I know next to nothing about Nascar, it was fun to have this little boy, weakened by chemo, still be able to roll his eyes at me in scorn and disbelief.
Lesson #3: Heroes can come in so many different packages.
3 comments:
love all this humanistic, touchy feely stuff! (you know I do!)
hung out on your blog for a few minutes today when i was supposed to be writing letters of recommendation for hardworking m4s. really enjoyed the backpacking through south america and the bug bites were hilarious. i maintain that you may possibly be one of the most entertaining people i know. (in a good way.)
keep it human,
dr. m
thank you for the bittersweet inspiration, ant.
... i miss working with kids... getting tired of working with adults... ha...
... i miss the medical field... sigh.
I've enjoyed reading your thoughts...thanks for sharing and hope you can keep it up. Your bold certainly addslots more to my day seeing what you encountered: your tears, emotion...you'll be a great doctor but don't forget to carry around a box of kleenex!!
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