I’ve spent a lot of time in children’s hospitals. I trained as a pediatric resident in New York City at the turn of the millennium and was a pediatric infectious-diseases fellow in Philadelphia after that. Twenty-five years later, I still love the challenge of a difficult diagnosis, the chance to help a family through a hard time, a moment of connection with a frightened kid. Children’s hospitals are places that no family wants to end up, but they’re also places of immense hope.
I was a tiny part of a long, steady progression in the profession of pediatrics. Thanks to an upward curve of knowledge and skill, we could do more to help sick children than the generation of pediatricians before us, and my colleagues and I would inevitably be surpassed by the generation that followed.
