Having a rotation in pediatrics will make your heart swell with joy and bleed with sympathy at the same time. This is mostly true for a lot of other rotations but personally, no other rotation quite clinches it the way pediatrics get to the heart. First off, I can still remember the first time I held a newborn in my arms. Not my baby, but still the feeling is so different. Like you have to be extra careful because the neonate is so fragile. Then you start to care for them and give them their vaccines, weigh, measure, and do physical examination. And for the few hours that they stay in the nursery, you get to bond with them and feed them until they need to be with their mothers. A new life is really a miracle. That's the happy end.
But there are also the sad end. It was just a few days ago when I first saw a child being revived because she went into cardiac failure. She had rheumatic heart disease and the Strep bacteria have been slowly but surely making sure her mitral valve becomes lax that by the time she was a little older, her mitral valve needed replacement. We weren't able to revive her.
There's also this kid who always greets me with the brightest smile whenever I pass by his ward. His diagnosis can't be clinched because his family is just so poor that they couldn't afford any laboratory test. He cries when his grandmother tells me that they can't afford the antibiotic regimen again today.
This is reality.
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