Death by chocolate?

Jamoca almond fudge ice cream with a chocolate muffin.

Small Kindnesses

We had a child come in this morning with ADHD and behavioral problems. The doctor interviewing him was a pediatric neurology fellow, Megan, who drops by once a week to attend the child psychiatry clinic. Megan's one of my favorite people to work with. She's smart and funny and has a wonderful talent for connecting with children, for feeling what they're feeling. A lot of this has to do with her own history as a patient. As a child she went undiagnosed with a brain tumor for almost two years. It was later operated on and removed but the experience of pain is something that stayed with her. She frequently draws upon it, showing the kids her surgery scars, to connect with her patients and help them feel at ease when she's talking to them in the clinic.

This morning, she got the child talking about how his classmates were teasing him at school. They made fun of his clothes and called him ugly. He had buck teeth and that was a constant source of ridicule which he tolerated for a while but was now fed up off and fighting back.

"Here, look," Megan said, pointing to her mouth. There was a slight gap between her front teeth.

"When I was a child, I had big teeth as well but then I wore braces and they didn't look so bad."

"Did it hurt?" the child asked, entranced by the prospect.

"A little and only when they were taken out," Megan reassured him. "And the braces they have now are like a million times better than when I was a child."

"Wow."

Wow, indeed.

Be Wise. Immunize.

Every child by two.

Gastronomical Paradox (or Have you had your daily dose of banality today?)

I'm not sure why it is but the more I eat, the more I want to eat. And the less I eat, the more my appetite shrinks. Like if I'm in a rush in the morning and I skip breakfast and work keeps me too busy to have lunch, then it's not like I'll hog at dinner. I'll just have a small something and an orange juice and go to bed. On the other hand, if I eat breakfast, then I start feeling hungry around noon so I have to have lunch which quickly necessitates the need for an afternoon snack in whose wake tiptoes a gigantic dinner like an elephant ballerina and before I know it I'm brushing my teeth trying to imagine all sorts of funky toothpaste flavors, like roast beef or chocolate chip.

Aren't you glad you read this?

Classy Kid

We were doing a mini mental status exam on a young kid this morning. One of the components of the exam is a serial 7's test which involves patients subtracting 7 from various numbers. We asked Mike to take seven away from a hundred and tell us the answer.

He thinks a little and then, giving us a cheeky smile, says, "Well, I'm not really a subtracting kind of person."