Medicine can wear down our hearts and souls. My journey in pediatrics has been filled with many rewarding experiences but haunting ones as well, like this one from my third year of residency. By that final year of training, I was no longer certain medicine was really the right choice for me. I was struggling with the notion that after almost 11 years of education, the destination was not quite what I expected. It was during this trying time I learned one of the most important lessons of my career: the value of trusting a mother’s intuition.
My patient was a 6-year-old girl whose mother was sitting next to her bedside.
“Something is not right about my daughter; I would like you to do a blood count.”
I was not compassionate. Frankly, I was so tired; I did not really care about her reasons for wanting the test.
“OK.”
I left the room to check the computer for prior visits, and a blood count had been done yesterday. Yesterday, the result was normal. I was incredulous. I went relay the story and mother’s request to my attending at the time. His answer was, “do another one and release her once the result comes back the same as yesterday.”
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