Com­par­isons of med­i­cine to vet­eri­nary med­i­cine are often made cau­tiously. Nonethe­less, I com­pared pedi­atrics to vet­eri­nary med­i­cine and thus, ruled it out as a med­ical spe­cialty. As an ani­mal lover, I avoided vet­eri­nary med­i­cine and the prospect of euth­a­niz­ing someone’s beloved pet. And since I love kids, I never really con­sid­ered pedi­atrics until this Princetern­ship! I spent part of read­ing period shad­ow­ing Dr. Debra Palazzi (attend­ing) and Dr. Chase McNeil (fel­low) who are part of the pedi­atric infec­tious dis­ease team at Bay­lor Col­lege of Medicine.

The first day began early. The other Princetern Tola, and I, were out of the house before 8:00 am in order to beat Houston’s morn­ing traf­fic and arrive at Texas Children’s Hos­pi­tal early (we’re all about a good first impres­sion!). Dr. Palazzi met us in the lobby and then we went to her office in order to dis­cuss her plans for the week. In addi­tion, Dr. Palazzi gave us the oppor­tu­nity to ask her ques­tions about her work in pedi­atric infec­tious dis­eases, her life at Prince­ton, our shared dis­like of organic chem­istry, and med­ical rota­tions in med­ical school.

Then, the fun really began: rounds!  We had the oppor­tu­nity to see really inter­est­ing yet sad cases:

1. a teenage boy with chronic osteomyelitis—bone infectious—and pseudomonas
2. a teenage girl with endo­cardi­tis, kid­ney fail­ure, and a myr­iad of other related health problems
3. a male sixth month child with con­gen­i­tal heart fail­ure (a hypoplas­tic L-heart) and bacteremia
4. a male teenager with leukemia and a fun­gal disease
5. a female teenager with a Baclofen instru­men­ta­tion infection

(Yet, not all the cases we saw were sad. We also had a new con­sult who was not sick.)

We got a chance to attend an Osteomyelitis Con­fer­ence where radi­ol­o­gists, orthe­p­edic sur­geons, and mem­bers of the infec­tious dis­ease team dis­cussed three of the patients. The con­fer­ence was extremely inter­est­ing because I got a chance to see how dif­fer­ent med­ical spe­cial­ists process the same information.

Fel­low Princetern Tola, Dr. Deb Palazzi, Ajibike, and Dr. Chase McNeil

On the sec­ond day, we revis­ited a major­ity of the first-day patients dur­ing rounds. Our vis­its this day were focused on updat­ing or con­firm­ing the drug reg­i­men depend­ing upon the results of pre­vi­ously ordered cul­tures and blood tests. The sec­ond day also dif­fered from the first because we changed loca­tions! We con­ducted our out­pa­tient vis­i­ta­tion in the Children’s Crit­i­cal Cen­ter. The patient we vis­ited had chronic osteomyelitis but appeared to be recov­er­ing well—this was cer­tainly good news after a slew of melan­choly cases before.

After­wards, we made our way down to the labs for micro-rounds. Dur­ing micro-rounds, we were able to see our patients’ fun­gal and bac­te­r­ial cul­tures and dis­cuss ways of treat­ing the infec­tions. Dur­ing our dis­cus­sion I was really glad to be tak­ing EEB 211 (Chaos and Clock­work of Bio­log­i­cal Design) this semester.

Tola and I attended a con­fer­ence called Fash­ion­ing Par­a­sitic Anti­gensinto Recom­bi­nant Pro­tein Vac­cines. The con­fer­ence was focused upon global health (an inter­est of mine) and dis­cov­ery and allo­ca­tion of afford­able vac­cines for trop­i­cal dis­eases which are gen­er­ally found in less devel­oped nations. We also got a chance to sit in on a meet­ing to dis­cuss the plan of action for a ten-year old boy who had quite pro­gres­sive osteomyelitis. The meet­ing includ­ing his oncol­ogy team, the infec­tious dis­ease team, and ortho­pe­dic sur­geons. The dis­cus­sion was obvi­ously seri­ous as the options for the boy were (1) imme­di­ate ampu­ta­tion or (2) an attempt to get rid of the infec­tious and sub­se­quent ampu­ta­tion, only if necessary.

On the third day, we con­tin­ued with rounds and I think the most strik­ing case of the day was a two month old who may (or may not) have inher­ited syphilis from his mother. After see­ing tons of cases in which infec­tion was unpre­ventable, it was odd to see a case where infec­tion was entirely pre­ventable. Luck­ily, peni­cillin will help.

Over­all, I got to shadow two amaz­ing doc­tors who had extremely inter­est­ing cases, but what else did I learn?

1. The world of med­i­cine may not be as glam­orous as it is por­trayed in Grey’s Anatomy, but it is cer­tainly just as exciting.
2. I am extremely, extremely inter­ested in pediatrics.
3. I shouldn’t stress out about organic chem­istry. It has lit­tle to noth­ing to do with actual medicine.
4. Med­i­cine is an extremely col­lab­o­ra­tive field. So, the com­pet­i­tive pre-med lifestyle def­i­nitely does more harm than good.

I def­i­nitely enjoyed my Princetern­ship and I strongly rec­om­mend Prince­ton stu­dents apply for a Princetern­ship your­self. Who knows, you may dis­cover your career path.