Tebyan Rabbani

Education Easily missed?: Early... Easily missed?: Early recognition of biliary atresia Practice Easily Missed?

It may be shameful to confess but I can feel myself actively tense whenever my work phone rings while working in the pediatric ICU. It’s usually the emergency room or an outside hospital calling to tell me about a critical child they have requiring ICU-level support. Anxiety washes over me momentarily. While the feeling is fleeting and soon replaced with a sense of duty, it’s always there. I am a Pediatric senior resident at UT Health San Antonio in my last two months of pediatric training.

There’s the surgical attending’s ‘70s rock playlist, the resident asking a hopeless medical student what artery runs through Calot’s triangle, the suctioning of excess blood, and of course the sound of cold air being pumped into the room at what I assume must be absolute zero. And yet, as I stood in that operating room, all I could hear was the inescapable pounding of my heart in my chest as my intestines raged violently. All I could feel were my sweat-soaked scrubs clinging to my aching body.