I remember back to my first few months of medical school when I was studying neurology. It happened to be one of my toughest classes in medical school, but at the same time I remember thinking the brain is amazing. This was also the time that I thought medicine was amazing and that we could heal all.
I attended a wedding that fall and met a friend of the family who had a 12 month baby. He was adorable. His mom told me he was recently diagnosed with cerebral palsy (CP). I quickly searched my my mind for that disease, but my mind was blank. I hadn't learned about it yet. His mom found out I was in med school, and typically started asking me tons of medical questions about CP, to which I knew none of the answers, but feeling reassured that medicine could save all, I told her that neurologists were doing amazing things these days and I was sure there would be an answer for her. I went back to school and looked up CP in our huge neurology book, and found that it didn't exist in there. I let it go and completely forgot about the whole thing.
Until now.
I've seen several CP kiddos in clinic and in the hospital. Although the severity of the disease is different for each kid, the prognosis is not good. I feel horrible for dropping the ball on that cute kid I saw 2 years ago. I had no idea what his mom was experiencing and I just played the "everything will be alright" card without really thinking and then moved on. I am sorry.
I attended a wedding that fall and met a friend of the family who had a 12 month baby. He was adorable. His mom told me he was recently diagnosed with cerebral palsy (CP). I quickly searched my my mind for that disease, but my mind was blank. I hadn't learned about it yet. His mom found out I was in med school, and typically started asking me tons of medical questions about CP, to which I knew none of the answers, but feeling reassured that medicine could save all, I told her that neurologists were doing amazing things these days and I was sure there would be an answer for her. I went back to school and looked up CP in our huge neurology book, and found that it didn't exist in there. I let it go and completely forgot about the whole thing.
Until now.
I've seen several CP kiddos in clinic and in the hospital. Although the severity of the disease is different for each kid, the prognosis is not good. I feel horrible for dropping the ball on that cute kid I saw 2 years ago. I had no idea what his mom was experiencing and I just played the "everything will be alright" card without really thinking and then moved on. I am sorry.
1 comment:
That is such a hard situation. A lot of my relatives have trouble with the boundaries of when to ask me things...of course they don't listen if I tell them not to smoke, but want to know about things that I am not qualified to tell them. CP is so varied and heterogenous, it is so hard to say what could happen. Don't be hard on yourself though, everyone gets put in a situation like that at some point and it is a natural response to try and comfort someone regardless.
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