Last week I was with Dr. Tejerina in the general pediatrics ward. She is a fantastic teacher and is extremely enthusiastic about the work that she does which is fantastic to witness. She works incredibly well with kids and you can easily tell how much she loves young people.
On a normal day I would help her take notes on the patients and also help interview the patients' mothers about 4 things: how the kids are eating, if their vaccines were up to date, how they were born (normal birth, c section, etc.) and how they were growing (is their height/weight, etc. normal). Tejerina deals a lot with Down Syndrome patients, and she taught me how to identify a few early signals, including the lack of a joint in the pinky finger, a line dividing the big toe from the others, heart problems (present in about 50% of Down patients) along with the basic signal of slow development.
Tejerina also dealt a lot with intoxications/poisons, and on our second day we say three different patients with three different poisons. One was an iron pill intoxication (they're used as supplements for pregnant mothers and are easily mistaken for M&M's), another was pesticides and the other was a calculator battery stuck in the kids nose. On this day I also helped translate an english textbook that described these intoxications.
The third day was specifically dedicated to Down patients, and I watched Tejerina advise a distressed and panicked couple who had a baby with Down that the diagnosis "opened a door to a beautiful new world", and that if diagnosed early enough, the hospital can help speed development as fast as possible so the child will have as normal a life as was possible.
On the first day we only saw a few patients as Patch Adams (the real guy that the movie is based off of) visited the hospital and so we ran to try and see him. He was dressed ridiculously (see above picture) and he really seemed to be able to connect well with the kids. He gave a talk in which he described his hospital which was free of charge, that required no insurance and that paid all of it's workers (from custodians to doctors) just $300 a month. For forty years, he "paid to be a doctor". While his talk was relatively broad and spoke of generalities like love and care (and was also painfully anti-american) I really do respect what he's done with his hospital and what he continues to do all around the world. He preached compassion and patient connection in hospitals, also saying that "the saddest thing that was last in the US medical world was the house call."
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