The Children's Hospital

I can sum up this entire blog with one word - AMAZING. Let's just go ahead and face facts though; I tend to be a bit more loquacious...so I'll go ahead and do my rambling thing.

This place is AWESOME. If I'm ever reincarnated as a sick kid, I want to be stuck here. No joke. The entire hospital is more kid friendly than I ever would have imagined. They try not to stick the kids in wheelchairs. Instead, they have radio flyers with poles attached to hold on to their IV bags if necessary. You see kids being hauled around in shiny red wagons all day long. I don't know about you, but as a kid wagons were second only to a live horse as far as transportation went in my book.

The floors are separated by specialty, and are color and animal coded. For example, the first floor is the pink floor, or the butterfly floor. The third floor is the green floor, or the froggy floor. Pretty sweet, huh? By and large, the rooms are private. Each one has an Xbox 360 and a flat screen TV. Each floor has a gigantic play room fully loaded with every board game you could imagine, video gaming systems, arts and crafts supplies, blocks, the list goes on and on. It's meant to be large enough to accomodate a sick kid in bed PLUS his/her entire preK/grade school class, should they come to visit all together.

The decor of the entire hospital is unbelievable. The floors are giant tile mosaics of animals and characters and the walls are covered in children's original art. I'll put up some pictures when I get the opportunity. I haven't even begun to dig in to the awesome training the staff is given on the intricacies of child-specific healthcare. The technologies employed here are unbelievable. Unfortunately, my nasty little cold prevented me from touring the neonatal ICU, but I've unfortunately had reason to spend ample time in one before.

I've been in Allied Health training for a few years now, and it's so completely awesome to be in a room and speak with professionals who cover all disciplines from adolescent psyh to child life to radiology to research management to pathology/lab medicine. It's like I'm seeing all these aspects finally mesh together to functionally support a sick kid and their entire family from inital symptoms to completion of treatment and followup. For lack of a better expression, I'm totally stoked about the whole thing.

I was excited about my job for a lot of reasons (mostly completely unrelated to pediatric care) coming in, but knowing that I'm a part of this institution has really become a motivating factor. Today was simply overall hospital orientation. I'll get into the intricacies of the lab environment and the molecular menu tomorrow, and I'm sure I'll be just as wound up after that!