Living Color

Yesterday I was at a district hospital attending morning report. The report included a child who was abandoned on the side of the road and was admitted pending placement. The child, a boy, was thought to be of Zimbabwean decent as "he is very dark". He was placed in peds to the consternation of the ward nurses there as they were worried that he might catch one of the ever present bugs looming in any ward.

I mentioned that these kids are often abandoned because the mother is overwhelmed, but also because the child might have some condition that confers high needs on him/her. So indeed we should do a careful exam to find any evidence of a congenital disease.

As we were rounding there, we went into a remote office where there was a child in a bassinet, in the corner. As I approached her I stepped over a mattress in the floor underneath the bassinet that had, I thought, a pile of blankets on it for the child above. I was getting ready to move the mattress aside with my foot, as it was clearly in the way. You can tell where this is going...The blankets moved and gave a little baby noise and I realized that this was the second child brought in last night! As always the tension was defused with laughter that a peds doc like me was going to "kick" the other child and "what, what, what".

So I put both kids in the bassinet head to toe, lying in opposite directions. The kids were children of color to be sure, African in conformation, and very different in pigmentation. One was the color of a double shot of espresso and the other a vente latte with lots of milk (or is it skinny?).

A nurse in the room remarked that these kids represented "black and white television" and then corrected himself and stated that they really were in "living color"! The laughter went on and on.

I needed that.