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Residents
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illness, and so I really enjoy that kids are able to find joy and still laugh. And they tend to get better quickly; they generally have things that we can fix, and they can get on with their lives; even childhood cancer is a
lot more curable.” “
Overall, COVID has not greatly impacted the work she does while on her various rotations, she said, adding that there are far fewer infec- tions among young people, and most of these are less severe than those with adults.
But the pandemic has impacted life for those patients in the Children’s Hospital, she said — there is less socialization among patients and restrictions on visitation. “It’s hard, especially if the child is sick and they have to stay in this one room the whole time they’re in the hospital.”
Meanwhile, it also impacts the overall learn- ing experience for residents.
Which brings Bates back to those Zoom ses- sions.
“I think it hurts our peer-to-peer relation-
ships, I think, because we don’t get to see each
other as much and talk through things that we
need to talk through and vent,” she explained.
“It’s been a little difficult, but I don’t think pediatrics hasn’t had it as bad as some of the others, like the internal-medicine folks, because they deal a lot more with COVID itself instead of its impacts.”
Bates said she entered her residency with the goal of specializing in emergency pediatrics, which, as not- ed, is one of the reasons she chose Baystate. She has also enjoyed working in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, or NICU, and is drawn to that work as well.
“I like the procedure component of it; I really like to do things with my hands, rather than prescribing medicine and talking to people,” she explained. “I’d rather do things, which is why I’m drawn to emergen- cy medicine. And in the NICU, you get this adrena-
Dr. Ruchi Betel believes “everything goes through pathology,” and that’s the field she is pursuing.
In a heathcare setting,
kids are really cool. That’s because they can be comforted, when sometimes adults can’t. A kid can have the same injury as an adult in the emergency room, and if you can make the kid laugh, he forgets that he has a cut on his forehead or maybe that he’s not feeling so well.”
line rush when a baby is delivered and they think they’re going to need NICU support, so they call us down; maybe they need us, maybe they don’t, but you have to be ready for anything. It’s like emergency medicine — you don’t know what’s going to come in on that ambulance.”
Simulating Real Life
As for Zambrano, his family settled in Fitchburg, just northwest of Worcester, and he attended medical school in Rochester, N.Y. When considering hospitals for residency, he wanted to return to Massachusetts,
Please see Residents, page 33