Paediatric posting

Finally, 6 weeks of paediatric posting has been ended.

It was quite an interesting posting. Every morning, we got to rush from USM to HRPZ ll. At there, we met children, we talked and played with them. Furthermore, only one on-call per week, quite “reasonable” lol. Overall, the arrangement was quite okay, just that part of me didn’t really like it as we could not follow up our patient’s condition after leaving HRPZ ll till the next morning. Clerking children is quite a huge difference from clerking adults. We need logical thinking a lot eg: babies can never complain about pain we can never mention things like headache, abdominal pain or dysuria when presenting our cases. And of course it’s tougher to do PE on them as they can be very naughty!

Honestly, I don’t really like children. It’s very irritating when your beautiful morning is full with babies’ cries. However, it’s sad too sometimes when you see those very sick babies or children. I have clerked a HIV+ child with multiple diagnosis found on him. He got a poor family background too. Can you imagine how the child will be next time without a supporting family and good social environment? Another thing is those patients with cerebral palsy or Down syndrome or whatever disease that will burden the parents. Are the parents willing to take care of them? How about their future? I can’t imagine how will I be too when my child is born with any disability. I really respected those mothers that could be so patient and caring in taking care of them in wards. Apart from that, we didn’t have much procedure to be done. BCG injection, baby bathing and a few more only. That’s the boring part.

The good part here was we didn’t have any “killer” doctors. They really judged us based on our performances. I didn’t do well throughout my posting. I know I didn’t cover a lot of things that I should study. I should do better. And I really appreciate all clinical teaching sections as I really learned a lot from doctors, especially those skills and knowledge that I couldn’t get or understand from books.

Anyway, paediatrics has came to an end. Surgery, the busiest posting, would be the next. Hopefully I can manage it better this time. Good luck to everyone. :)