On a dark & stormy night...

Time: 2200 hrs

Location: At home

Activitity: Having a pillow fight with 4 blonde bombshells. Ok, fine. Watching TV and drinking Milo

Beep beep beep, beep beep beep, beep beep beep

Damn. My pager.

Me: "Hi. This is Dr. V. I was paged..." (Let this be a wrong number...)

Her: "Oh hi, thanks for calling back. Is this peds endo?"

Me: "Er. Sortakinda...." (read: no, this is the ADULT endocrinology fellow, who's doing a rotation in something that doesn't concern him)

Her: "Pardon?"

Me: "Never mind. Yea, this is endo. Shoot, go ahead." (Endo is endo, right? Kids are just small adults. Maybe I can clinch this one. After all I take pretty good care of my adult patients. And I AM board-certified in internal medicine)

Her: "Ok. Well, we have this 3 day old fullterm baby boy who had a newborn metabolic screen that showed bla-bla-blah-might-as-well-be-talking-in-Greek-cos-I'm-not-a-blardi-pediatrician-bla-bla.... So, what should we do? "

Me: O_o (I fight the overwhelming temptation to pretend I'm losing the cellular connection)

". . . . . . . . . . . . hmmm . . . . . . . . . .ahem, cough cough. . . . . . . . . . (scratches chin). . . . . . . . "

(Apparently, kids are not just small adults)

Her: "Hello, are you still there?"

Me: "Let me talk to my boss and call you back!"

Her: >_<

I hate this rotation.

Though I suppose this is better than when I was oncall for infectious diseases as a resident and got weird phonecalls from ulu-hospitals seeking advice on proper antibiotics for septic patients already on gorillamycin and tyrannosaurofloxacin. Now that was WAY out of my league.