I am a specialist in pediatric critical care medicine, which means that I take care of children in the intensive care unit. Even when very sick, children are focused on the most important things to them – recovering fully so they can go back to playing and being healthy. Their remarkable resilience and sense of wonder, even during their most vulnerable and critical times, is what gets me out of bed each morning. It is a privilege to take care of children in this setting, and my pride to be able to work with them every day. My patients are children of all ages who need advanced levels of care and monitoring in the intensive care unit, and sometimes invasive therapies. This can mean anything from a child with lung disease bad enough to need a ventilator, severe infections that cause dangerously low blood pressure, or organs that no longer work and need to be supported until a transplant can be found. My job is to support and coordinate among children and families, nurses, nutritionists, physical therapists, and other specialist doctors, so that the entire team can maintain the body’s delicate balance and allow it to function during a critical illness. My research focuses on what happens to children after they recover from critical illness and go back home to their normal lives. Do they continue to develop normally? How long does it take? What other kinds of problems might occur? How can we best help with any lingering health issues? These are the kinds of questions that I am trying to answer as both a critical care doctor and scientist by using the medical record and other sources of data on children who have recovered from critical illness. In addition, I am an assistant director of the training program in pediatric critical care medicine, where I focus on our trainees’ understanding of research, statistics, and epidemiology. One of my joys in life is helping the next generation of doctors grow and eventually surpass their predecessors. That way, we can continue to push medical care forward, and take even better care of the sickest children in the hospital.
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