A child’s smile — that’s what got me into pediatrics. I was fresh from my third-year rotation on internal medicine and my first pediatric patient was a 5-year-old whom I had to get down on my knees to examine. As I was listening to his heart, he looked up at me with a smile and gave me a huge hug. I was a goner … I went into pediatrics and never looked back.
As a resident at St. Christopher’s Hospital working in an impoverished section of Philadelphia, I kept seeing those smiles. They were lurking behind tears or responding to my corny jokes or the little fuzzy animals on my stethoscope. But there was worry there, too — families struggling with too little money, too little food and children who were hearing and seeing adult problems too big for them to solve. As I moved into caring for children with obesity, the concerns of chronic illness were added on.
[For more of this story, written by Sandra G. Hassink, go to http://aapnews.aappublications...ontent/36/8/6.1.full]
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