Wednesday, January 25, 2006

on the bright side

I recently heard that Jason Lee is taking a break from filming his t.v. series, My Name is Earl, because he has "adult chickenpox". It's a good excuse for missing work. I'm wondering whether he has shingles or primary varicella, but that's really not the point of this post.
The point of this post is that I, too, have a good reason for not blogging over the last week or so. I mean, besides the obvious/lame "I've been really busy with work" sort of thing. I have been busy, but the real reason is that I've been struggling with how to set the tone for this blog. We've had a very sad week here in the ICN. I could have posted about the death of this beautiful baby boy who struggled for months after having a very severe meconium ileus (and cystic fibrosis) and how sad AND relieved it makes me that he's not suffering anymore. I wasn't sure, though, that this was the best forum for processing all of that grief.
I see a lot of horrible things in my line of work. What I try to take from it, though, is that, given how miserable things can turn out, isn't it a wonderful occurence when it all works out? As a for instance, we got a transport from a small, community hospital of a 26 week baby. His mom had had an abruption after a fairly uneventful early pregnancy. The initial story was that he was very depressed at birth and was being transferred to our hospital essentially to die. When he got here, however, he looked a million times better than we thought he would. He's now several weeks old and doing wonderfully. Not out of the woods by any means, but doing so very well for a baby of that extreme prematurity. His parents are the sweetest people in the world and have nothing but faith in their "fiesty" little boy. For them, the cup is always going to be half-full. I'd love to always have that optimism.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm so glad you had some good news to balance out the sad.

As for what to blog and when...it's purely up to you. I read several medical bloggers and they always vary their posts between work stuff and personal and sometimes just med news. It's interesting actually. So I think it's okay to post whatever you like. :)

I recently made a separate blog due to our elections here in Canada. I have so much frustration and anger, I didn't want to dump it on my readers ;) But you're not doing that so no worries. Blog away!

Anonymous said...

What she said. I like reading what you have to say.