Tempestuous ;;

and when she speaks

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Dr Chaudary is great.
Right now I'm on call for Paeds.
She is my staff doctor for the night, and she gave me her phone number to have a nice warm home-cooked Indian meal with her family :)
I said 'Thank you Dr..You don't know how happy & grateful we feel when people open their doors to us, especially being in a foreign country'
She said 'It's my pleasure. Just give me a call and I will cook you a nice spicy meal'
I clapped my hands in excitement LoL * and in joy and happiness ;) - authentic Indian food wei.., would YOU pass down this oppportunity too?*

My senior resident had a treat for us. Since it was a beautiful sunny summer out there this afternoon, we had 'summer school'- it was hilarious. All 3 senior medical students and 4 residents sitting out by the hospital lawn, right under the sun, she brought out from her bag- a tub of vanilla ice-cream, a can of caramel and a huge bag of M&Ms' =) *awesome resident, I know, we're so well-treated*

In the meantime, I remembered I brought out my camera so I whipped it out and approached a nearby hospital visitor and got him to take two pictures of the team sitting around a table, smiling with food and a make-shift cardboard as our teaching board :). I heard Acker tell the team 'This Sue, always taking photos of everything! She must have like 600 photos!' The team laughed =) Well, it is for memory sake!
Had yummy ice-cream and a great antibiotic teaching session.
Then, I had to run off to do an admission of a patient with cervical lymphadenitis.

Well, play time is done for today. I'm going to bed before I get paged tonight. *knock on wood*
LOVE.

her
STORY,
her ALIBIS
6:20 AM;;

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Siddharth called me a few weeks back when I just returned from Malaysia to ask how I was, and after our conversation, I told him I'd put what he had shared with me into my blog.

He was in --- an ulu place somewhere far away from Halifax for one of his rotations, when one of his patients had recently come back from a heart surgery done in the hospital I was working at, at that time; Halifax Infirmary.

Sid knew I was rotating through Cardiac Surgery then and asked the patient if he knew me. The patient remarked 'Oh yes, that Chinese girl. She was so sweet to me throughout my stay and took good care of me'
Sid passed me that wonderful message, to make my day :)

It's so nice to know you made a difference in someway, somehow... and even nicer to know that your efforts were much appreciated and acknowledged.

Those days in cardiac ICU, I still remember
an old lady gripping my hand tight, not letting me go, when she started having shortness of breath...
an old man with an absent family coming in for a major heart surgery with nobody by his side, so I went to him, and just a simple short conversation can do so much to lift a patient's spirit and make him feel less alone, less fearful...

Today in Pediatric Medical Unit, a 15 year old teenager who came in with alcohol overdose and was initially in the ICU, gave me a hug before I left the room. She wasn't my patient, but I had done an interview with her just the day before and we touched on her drug & drinking & tobacco habits and teenage issues like safe sex, her sexual orientation, her family and friends.

I was a bit concerned at first if she would share those personal aspects of her life with me...
turns out she did. Her whole story unfolded - family problems, peer pressure, her goals in the future, her friends...

It was definitely heart-warming as she slowly gained trust and revealed her experiences, hiding underneath that facade. She told me she doesn't talk to her mum- as it turns out, she's more mature & responsible than I had expected. She wished her mum and her would have a more open relationship.

SO the next day, when I saw her mum, I popped in and talked to her. I told her, her daughter is a bright girl who has a good head on her shoulders, and how she has dreams for herself. Her daughter came in at that very time, and we three had a nice chat.

When I said goodbye, she came up to me and hugged me.
That felt so warm- fuzzy bear warm :) It felt really nice...

I sure hope this has taken their relationship slightly deeper and made them closer together.
You know, I have a good feeling about this- in fact, I'm pretty positive :)

Oh - that interview with her was a project each of us have to undertake. And you have to be graded by your patient. She wrote the nicest thing on my sheet:
" I felt I could actually talk to her and she is VERY nice"
awwww......

her
STORY,
her ALIBIS
5:13 AM;;