Chapter 2327: Don’t Believe Hearsay
In pediatrics, you’ll often see diseases that are rarely encountered in adult departments. Students who have completed their rotations in general adult surgery and then move to pediatric surgery often feel like they are stepping into a whole new world again.
Following the doctor’s instructions, the child’s mother placed the infant on the examination bed.
Duan Sanbao led two Guoxie students over, holding a stethoscope in hand.
As usual, Student Xie took out a notebook and pen to assist the consulting doctor in inquiring about the patient’s medical history. Since the young patient couldn’t speak, the inquiry was directed toward the child’s family members.
"How many months old is he?"
"Just turned eight months, born at the maternity and childcare hospital."
"When did you notice him vomiting? What did he vomit?" As she spoke, Xie Wanying glanced over, observing the child’s condition along with the other doctors.
Wearing gloves, both Duan Sanbao and Wei Shangquan carefully opened the child’s small pacifier, checking if any vomitus was blocking the child’s trachea and esophagus, and then extracted any remaining vomitus from the child’s mouth to prevent choking.
The nature of the vomitus helps the doctor in differential diagnosis.
Probing further, it seemed the child had some "small lumps" remaining in the mouth.
An eight-month-old baby’s diet usually goes like this: before weaning off breast milk, milk remains the primary nutrition, with several feedings a day. In between, complementary foods are first introduced, similar to the menu of previous months, with various liquid and semi-liquid foods. Liquids include things like fruit juice and rice soup. Semi-liquids require parents to put in more effort to make different hand-processed pastes, which can be rice flour, lotus root flour, egg custard, fruit puree, etc.
A child’s first baby tooth typically emerges around six months; some children may see the tip as early as three months, while others are slower. Overall, few children experience it after one year. The first complete baby tooth usually erupts between six and nine months. Thus, an eight-month-old is typically in a vigorous teething period and can be introduced to solid foods to train their chewing ability. At this time, instead of making juice or puree, it’s also okay to cut the fruit into small pieces to feed the child directly.
Some grandparents, based on their life experience, might break up softer foods like bananas for the child to eat.
The "small lumps" in the child’s mouth were solid food as a complementary food. Was the child vomiting because the solid food was difficult to digest after entering the child’s digestive tract? Wiping the child’s small mouth, the doctor examined carefully and saw that besides vomiting "food chunks," the child also vomited milk.
"I asked his grandmother. The grandmother said she fed him a little banana and nothing else," the child’s mother told the doctor. "He’s had bananas before, last month, and didn’t vomit. I’m not sure if his grandmother lied and actually fed something else."
The child’s grandmother was waiting outside, afraid to come in. She feared that if the doctor said the problem with the child was because she, the grandmother, fed him incorrectly, she might be held responsible.
There’s very little chance the elderly lady lied. Given the child’s age, it’s unlikely the grandmother is old; she’s likely clear-minded and intelligent. Elders love the children, and to say they’d intentionally put random things in the child’s mouth to harm them is improbable. The chance of elders causing feeding errors due to ignorance of modern medical science is low. We need to be objective about this and not generalize the entire elder generation based on the media’s eye-catching stories about a few ignorant, superstitious elders.