Recruitment

Today I went to the USC Medical Sciences campus and spoke with a group of medical students about the shortage of pediatric neurologists. I went with the president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Epilepsy Foundation of America, a pediatric neurologist from USC and another parent of a child with epilepsy who is also a film-maker and who had made a moving, informational video about pediatric epilepsy. Our goal is to make our way through California and perhaps the rest of the country (!), appealing to medical students to address and perhaps change the profound shortage of pediatric neurologists. I won't bore you with statistics but there are thousands of children with seizure disorders PER NEUROLOGIST in this country. We need more.

I'd never been to the USC medical sciences campus and when I drove up to the building where we would be speaking I realized that I was a half an hour early. I parked my car at a meter and got ready to read the notes that I had prepared, but when I glanced up and out at the campus, I had a jolt of anxiety. I always get anxious when I go to hospitals and can only figure that it's a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. I honestly HATE hospitals and medical centers. The sight of young doctors and medical professionals makes me feel queasy, and it takes a lot of breathing and concentration to talk myself "down." I have a lot of friends for whom this doesn't happen. Even though they've spent lots of hours with their children at clinics and hospitals and emergency rooms, they claim to NOT have these sorts of feelings. They feel safe, they say, taken care of, and not a little in awe of the bustle and brains that are seemingly behind the operation.

Not me. Not me at all. I positively DREAD going near medical sciences buildings. But today I had to go in and talk, hopefully inspire, spin stories, be positive, be jolly, say We need you. We need you desperately to help our children. Don't be a dermatologist!

The lecture hall was HUGE and slanted downward. There were about ten overhead flat-screen televisions. The medical students that filed in were young. So young. I swear that some of them looked like they had acne. I was old enough to be their mother. But they were earnest and serious and asked questions. The neurologist was fantastic, and the video seemed to make an impact. The students ate Subway sandwiches and rushed off to another class. We had to hurriedly leave the auditorium when an alarmingly bespectacled physician came in and set up his notes and slides. I felt sorry for the students filing in, because they faced those ten television screens with the words "THE PATHOLOGY OF AIDS" on all of them. The other parent, whom I barely knew said in a dark way that I can certainly understand, "From the sublime to the absurd." I couldn't get out of there faster.

I hope we made a dent. I hope one of those fresh faces felt even a nudge. In the meantime, I'm happy to be writing in my cosy room.