Joe mentioned this before, but it didn’t strike me until today when I noticed my new employer’s logo on the signage in front of the hospital…the logo looks remarkably like a famous banana distributor’s logo:
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Very different, of course! But it’s blue and ovoid, and usually printed small on ID badges and letterhead and such, so I can see where the confusion may lie.

Clinic makes me anxious for my fellowship to truly start. I’m seeing all these former premie babies in their full toddler glory in outpatient clinic, and while it’s interesting, it bothers me that I’m in clinic and not in the ICU. It’s amazing that I’ve already made the transition in my mind from resident to fellow. As a general peds resident, I was happy to learn about anything and everything related to children of all ages and shapes and sizes. As a fellow, I’m feeling the pull to really only think about the ICU management of sick babies - I don’t care about ear infections or Crohn’s disease or acute lymphoblastic leukemia anymore because those things don’t affect newborns. Give me ventilator settings and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy!

In other news, Gully is still lodged firmly in the womb, and we haven’t picked a middle name yet. My dad tried enlisting the help of my relatives in Hong Kong for this, but no one had much interest in this, the rationale being that she’s an American kid, and any Chinese name will be bastardized anyway. In fact, their favorite name involved the syllable “Ga,” which means “family,” but the endearing name would be “Ga-Ga,” just as my family calls me “Ying-ying.” “Ga-ga” just doesn’t go well in the American vernacular, particularly now that we have Lady Gaga parading about in popular culture. At this point, my mom and dad are throwing together sounds (yes, just plain old Chinese sounds, not even words with meaning) and seeing if Joe can pronounce them or not, and if he likes how it sounds and we are sure that her school teachers won’t completely butcher it and embarrass her, then they will dig around to find a meaning to fit the sound.  I think it’s the equivalent of parents picking out make-believe names that we often see plastered around the NICU, like “Leileyiki Rose” (”I just wanted something Hawaiian-sounding.”)

I’m tired, but mostly my pelvis is tired, which is probably too much information.  You see, fellowship orientation started this week, and while the majority of it has been about meeting new people and becoming acquainted with the different hospitals I’ll be working at, 50% of my time has been about walking back and forth to various buildings all over the Longwood campus trying to obtain badges for each of the hospitals.  And I’ve discovered that walking, while all my ligaments are stretching and compound joints are becoming all undone due to this pregnancy, is tough on my pelvis.  Word to my pelvis: stop hurting, please! I still have another handful of days of badge acquisition and walking to do.

I also wish I had some profound thoughts to jot down, but I don’t.  Today, we had NRP review at this state-of-the-art simulation center using a wacky super-fancy neonate dummy.  (NRP is the Neonatal Resuscitation Program, which is a protocol for resuscitating newborn babies.) The neonatal dummy, NewB (pronounced “Newbie,” ha) was pretty cool - she cries, she breathes, she develops perioral cyanosis, she can have a heart beat and pulse; she has an umbilical stump that you can catheterize.  The only profound thing I learned from our mock code was that on the video replay, I talk too softly and I am really humongous at this stage in my pregnancy.  And I make funny hand gestures, apparently.  The video replay was quite informative.

Trading in my pedi stethoscope for my neo stethoscope…even tinier!