May 15th, Tuesday

Today I did rounds again with Dr. Martin, but now there are only like 12 babies in the unit and since there are two attendings it took like 15 minutes. After that, he had to go have meetings with lawyers so I was passed off to the other attending for her rounds.  Dr. Martin does his rounds super fast, all the nurse practitioners call it lightening rounds, so when I did rounds with Dr. Yao it took about 45 minutes.  A lot of the babies that I met last week are now almost all home, which is really good for them! There are a few that have been in the unit for months, and that's really sad because the doctors can't really figure out how to help or cure them.  They're all super cute, and most of them are almost like normal baby size, but a few are tiny.  Sometimes babies are so small in the unit that their mothers are afraid to touch them because they think that they might hurt them or break something so the nurses have to help teach parents to become comfortable with the babies.  That's sad to, mostly because some of the mothers are younger than all of us.  That happened today too, one of the mothers was younger than me and it was kind of awkward being in the room because she was so young with a baby.  I also went to clinic for an hour or so.  Clinic is when babies who have been discharged come back and see the doctors, so it's basically a check up. It was really interesting to see how far the babies come in just a matter of weeks or months.  One of the babies that came to clinic was probably the cutest thing I've ever seen.  He has like gray eyes that were almost a little bit blue, a color I hadn't ever seen before.  He just kept smiling, and it was good to see him be so happy because of confidential reasons.