surfers healing

this week was virginia beach's annual east coast surfing championship. the coolest surfing of thursday night was definitely this father-son pair. this 20 month old got to ride on dad's back like he was a seat turtle. it was great to watch. talking to them after, i found out they live right up the street from me in norfolk. small world. by the way, if you're interested in autism, go to surfline.com and search "surfer's healing". there as a video there which tells about a group that started out in california to help autistic kids cope with their autism through surfing, the younger kids riding piggyback and learning to stand on a board as they got older. there is something about the routine of paddling out, riding in, the white noise of the ocean waves, the consistency of water, air, sand, and most importantly for me, being cut off from the world onshore. i am not surprised that this has benefit for autistic kids, who greatly value consistency and multisensory engagement. 

the anesthesia machine

i know, it looks like something ray bradbury would write about, but this is part of the apparatus that allows patients to be unconscious during surgery. surgical anesthesia (an = negative, esthesia = of the senses or perception, as in AESTHETICS) is relatively recent development in the history of the medicine, being pioneered around the time of the north american civil war in the mid 1800s. so i haven't written in a while, been busy, but i've now finished my 2 week rotation in anesthesia at children's hospital of the king's daughters in norfolk, VA. i loved it. as a fourth year med student i was free to take as much initiative as i wanted, and in the last 2 weeks i placed my first endotracheal tube and quite a few more since then, on different sizes of kids. one day, in fact i had a patient who weighed in at 1.7 kg (about 4 lbs), and another patient who weighed nearly 70 kg (150 lb), almost 40 TIMES the size of my other patient! to give you a sense of scale, a 1.7 kg kid can wrap their entire hand around your smallest fingertip. crazy, huh? that's another miracle of modern medicine, that we can keep those kids alive. 

back to the beach

i've been back in norfolk/va beach since last thursday, and really revelling in seeing familiar faces again. I wasn't sure I would know anybody since my class graduated, but people are turning up left and right. my cousin mike is my new roommate and it's been cool to hang out with him when he's not working at naval hospital. so i now have 4 days plus this afternoon until i start pediatric anesthesia, which i'm looking forward to. i've been surfing twice since getting back, once at first street beach and once with matthew down at wrightsville bch, NC, where my friend emily got married to sumanth last weekend. for their wedding they got turtles from yates and alicia, which i thought was a creative gift. the above photo is from another beach, on the southwest coast of nicaragua.