stroke rounds

It’s exactly what it sounds: a team of medical professionals “rounding” (essentially going door-to-door, presenting patients, and working out the plans) on all the stroke patients at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.  Stroke is not a common pediatric diagnosis, so the fact that we have rounds devoted to this patient population speaks to the unique glimpse of medicine CHOP provides.

I know it’s a rare thing, but that gives me little peace (not that I am the one who should be comforted) when I’m standing four feet from an exhausted mother, holding her whimpering toddler, who is neurologically destroyed.  It’s such a contrast from my happy, well daughter who greets me when I get home.  I’ve never struggled so much to keep it together.

One of our patients suffered a stroke as a result of a disease I didn’t think I would see in this context during my training.  Haemophilus influenza (h. flu) used to be one of the greatest causes of bacterial sepsis/meningitis in young children.  Since the vaccine came on the scene in the 1990s, we’re taught that it’s been virtually eradicated as threat of invasive disease.  Vaccines aren’t 100% affective, which is one of the reasons we rely on herd immunity.  I think I’m pretty granola, but it baffles me when parents choose to not vaccinate their children out of fear of some erroneous association with cognitive difficulties, when they’re essentially putting their children (and those of others) at risk for potentially much more devastating neurological sequelae.

Article on the physician who started this controversy…