Resident On Call by Scott A. Rivkees

Author:Scott A. Rivkees
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2014-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

The Bump

I’d never seen a two-year-old jumped before. This was no ordinary two-year-old, nor was East Boston an ordinary city. Johnny was born to a teenage mother. He came into this world screaming and wiggling, covered with the thick sticky paste of vernix pasted to his skin like all other children. But unlike other children, he had a large bump just above the bridge of his nose at birth.

The bump, about the size of a grape, protruded an inch from his forehead. It felt soft and moved when poked, like a pad of melting butter in a gold foil wrapper.

He was admitted to the pediatric ward, directly across from the room where the out-of-town SIDS babies roosted while waiting for their breathing studies. But the bump was a real problem, and we struggled to find its cause.

House officers, medical students, faculty, even the Gray Hairs, lined up to look at the infant, who was big at birth, ten pounds. They would walk in, press the bump, and walk out saying, “Interesting,” which is hospital jargon for “I have no idea what’s going on.” Saying “interesting” conveys intelligence, signs of inner thought, brain gears moving, even though the brain gears were jammed in stupefaction.

In addition to the child’s size and the bump, he had a look about him not seen in the other bulky babies who dotted our wards. His face was flat, and his eyes followed you around the room.

Big babies reached our units time and again, usually born to women with poorly controlled diabetes, whose sugar crossed the placenta to overfeed these babies in the womb. Large infants were typically placed in the neonatal intensive care units, hospitalized for drops in glucose levels. How women gave birth to leviathan children was beyond our imagination; ten-, twelve-, and thirteen-pound babies plopped out. Collar bones would be broken or an arm dislocated. Yet with the hardiness of infancy come remarkable healing properties, and in a week these babies were fine.

Some of the nurses amused themselves and us with these babies, dressing the girls like performers in the circus, applying blue eye shadow. They fashioned dresses out of the crinkly exam-table paper sprinkled with glitter. They put bangles on the babies’ wrists after the lights were down for the night.

Rounds kicked off in the early morning when the sun poked up, and the babies were arranged for their beauty pageant. Rounds over, the outfits came off and the infants were just babies again.

But Johnny wasn’t touched by the night nurses. He was left alone and respected in his room, the center of curiosity. The nurses who fed him were the first to notice that although Johnny lay passive, there was no satisfying him when he ate.

A newborn takes two or three ounces of formula with each feeding, given every three hours. Three ounces for Johnny was a warm-up. Three ounces would go down in a blink, and then another three ounces would be swallowed just as fast, followed by loud, wet burps that rolled like thunder.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.