As 2021 Draws To An End…

I find myself reflecting back nostalgically on the years prior to this COVID pandemic, but hopeful/determined that 2022 will be better. For some reason, this year, I realized that it’s been over a decade since I went into private practice, most of which has been as the solo doctor at Cevey Pediatrics. One of the things I have enjoyed the most over the years has been the opportunity to meet my newborn patients who delivered at Main Methodist in the hospital the day after they were born. When I see these same patients in the office for checkups, many of whom are now about to become teenagers, I reminisce back to that first time I met them in the hospital when they were so, so tiny. Medical practice back then was simpler, as the complications of this pandemic have changed the medical landscape through which we’ve all been forced to navigate.

With COVID testing so common a requirement for my patients to return to school nowadays, with those tests oftentimes resulting around the time that I’d previously dedicated to visiting my newborns, and with the rush to get those patients a school note clearing them to return that day before school actually starts, I’ve sadly made the decision to stop making those newborn rounds. This decision was not made lightly, since each newborn hospital visit is such a special memory. However, having to review COVID results, notify parents, and get their children school notes in time to not be late for school, while going to the hospital to examine the newborns, possibly do a circumcision, and enter orders and other information into their hospital records, all before I get to the office and get ready to see patients that day, has been too overwhelming.

I fully trust that the pediatric hospitalists who are already taking care of my newborns born at all the other hospitals in San Antonio are going to continue to do an excellent job, just at an additional hospital, but I feel that transmitting the information about COVID and respiratory PCR results and making the determination as to whether a specific patient is cleared to return to school and/or needs a prescription is a job I should not delegate to anyone else in my office. I had intended, therefore, to stop making newborn rounds at any hospital, including Methodist Main, starting January 1, 2022. However, as some of you have personally seen, I broke my foot over Thanksgiving weekend, and therefore, this decision has had to be moved up to be effective immediately. As mentioned above, all my newborns’ initial hospital care now is going to be managed by the full time pediatric hospitalists, with their first visit with me at the office ideally still before they are a week old. Maybe the next years will bring an end to this pandemic, and maybe that will allow me to reinstate these newborn hospital visits, but for now, I have to let them go…