The David Loeb Interview

The Doctor Anonymous Show is proud to welcome Dr. David Loeb to show 39 on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 9pm Eastern Time. He is a pediatric oncologist which is a cancer doctor for kids. I've always been fascinated by those who choose to take care of kids with cancer. That has got to be tough work. His blog is called Doctor David's Blog: Musings of a Pediatric Oncologist. (See video post above)

Below, I wanted to share a post called "How Do You Know A Teenager is Well:"

My pager goes off all the time. Usually, it’s an annoyance, interrupting something I’m doing (talking with a patient, driving to work…) for something that may not be as urgent. (“Do you want to admit the patient on Wednesday or next Friday?”)

But sometimes the pager tells me something good.

Last week, one of my patients had a catastrophic experience – a 28-minute seizure that was the first sign of a previously-undetected metastasis to her brain. We admitted her to the ICU and arranged for surgery the next day. Unfortunately, that day I had a previously-booked flight to an osteosarcoma conference in Houston. So I asked a colleague to page me when the surgery was done.

I landed in Houston, turned on my pager, and moments later received this message, “M [the patient] out of OR, extubated, texting her friends.”

She’s a teenager. She’s texting her friends, so she must be doing well!

I also wanted to mention my little experiment from last weekend. So, I have this ustream account and last weekend on Saturday night, I turned on the camera on my laptop. I opened up the chat room over there, and for about 3 hours, we had people come in and out of the chat room and just hang out and talk. It was a lot of fun. Now, as usual, there were some technical problems and sometimes, I lost the picture. But everyone just kept chatting, and I played some music which people could year on the video/audio stream. Thanks to all of you who showed up to hang out. I should do that again sometime....