"Running the room"
Nine hours with a pediatric emergency medicine fellow
Suzan Mazor's night shift in the emergency room at Children's Memorial begins
with a phone call. Paramedics are bringing in a young boy who swallowed some
cleaning fluid. Mazor is a third-year fellow in pediatric emergency medicine,
and for the next nine hours she is in charge of the unit.
There's no way of predicting who will come through the doors needing
immediate attention this evening. Sports injuries, car crashes, victims of
violence, chronically ill children, fevers, ear infections and jammed fingers
all bring hundreds of children and concerned parents to the ER each day.
Prepared for anything and teaching everything
Children's Memorial is prepared for anything at anytime. It is a Level One
Pediatric Trauma Center, a designation given to only a few hospitals capable of
treating the highest acuity patients with pediatric medical and surgical
sub-specialists on call 24-hours a day. It's also what makes this hospital an
ideal teaching and learning environment according to Steven Krug, MD, division head, emergency
medicine. " We see every kind of illness and injury here, from benign to the
extremely rare.
"Children's Memorial is the best place in Chicago to train
pediatric emergency medicine," says Dr. Suzan Mazor. "It's the only place I
wanted to come for a fellowship."
Under Krug's direction, Children's Memorial has become a national leader in
pediatric emergency medicine education. "Children's Memorial is the best place
in Chicago to train in pediatric emergency medicine," says Mazor. "It's the only
place I wanted to come for a fellowship." During certain night shifts, fellows
are the most senior physicians in the emergency room. Fellows (board-certified
pediatricians getting advanced emergency medicine training) are responsible for
"running the room." Before her shift is over, Mazor will have examined patients,
guided residents, consulted specialists, ordered tests, prescribed medication
and comforted parents.
At 11 p.m. the emergency department buzzes with activity. Nurses and
residents dart in and out of rooms - taking histories, collecting samples and
starting procedures. At the center of it all, Mazor is on the phone with the
Illinois Poison Center. She listens intently then fires a series of questions
into the receiver gathering as much information as she can before two-year-old
Kinte Grampton arrives. His family is fortunate. Poison management is Mazor's
specialty and she thinks he's going to be okay. Mazor recently started a
concurrent toxicology fellowship at Cook County Hospital and she's eager to put
her special expertise to work at Children's Memorial. She checks a couple of
sources — a poison database and a formulary — to confirm her hunch. "It's
serious. But of all the things a child can ingest, household bleach isn't the
worst," she says. "It's mostly water." Mazor checks "the board," a list of
patients, their chief complaint and acuity status from one (highest) to four
(lowest) to determine the next priority. She quickly moves from exam room to
exam room tending to a nine-month-old with a bump on her head, a teen with an
injured ankle, a choking incident in an infant, a young girl with abdominal pain
and a fever, and a boy with a deep lip laceration.