{"id":2798,"date":"2019-09-30T08:50:57","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T13:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/?p=2798"},"modified":"2019-07-31T16:58:16","modified_gmt":"2019-07-31T21:58:16","slug":"why-i-love-id-dr-nicolas-cortes-penfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/2019\/09\/30\/why-i-love-id-dr-nicolas-cortes-penfield\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Love ID &#8211; Dr. Nicolas Cortes-Penfield"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\"><p><strong>What about ID makes you excited?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I love a good medical mystery or diagnostic challenge.\u00a0 Infectious disease specialists are often the experts other physicians turn to when they\u2019re stumped by a patient\u2019s seemingly inexplicable symptoms &#8211; a persistent fever, a perplexing rash, abnormal bloodwork that hints at inflammation in the body no one can seem to track down.\u00a0 As a kid who grew up listening to <em>Car Talk<\/em> on NPR and wondering at how the two hosts could make diagnoses over the phone that other mechanics had missed in person just by getting a good story, that aspect of the job really resonates with me. I still find making tough diagnoses that have frustrated patients and their doctors immensely satisfying.<\/p>\n<p>I also appreciate that Infectious Diseases gives me the opportunity to move though all of the different domains of medicine.\u00a0 By that, I mean that the ID team may be called to see patients in the Emergency Room, on the post-operative surgical ward, in the ICUs, in Labor &amp; Delivery, or anywhere else, sometimes all in the same day.\u00a0 We get to interact with all of the various other types of clinicians \u2013 hospitalist, medical and surgical specialists, radiologists, pathologists, laboratory microbiologists, pharmacists, nurses, etc &#8211; and rather than focusing on a single organ system and a handful of diseases we\u2019re challenged to consider the whole patient and the full spectrum of medical illness.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I love that the keys to challenging ID cases are often in the social history \u2013 that is, in asking the patient the sorts of questions about their lives that are too often curtailed in the bustle of modern medicine. That means that part of doing my job well is spending the time to uncover the unique and more interesting sides of my patients and having the opportunity to develop a bit of a relationship.\u00a0 Do you volunteer at the zoo and clean the cages in the rodent house?\u00a0 Did you live in the Middle East for a year overseeing an oil pipeline construction project? Did you vacation in the rainforests of Borneo and sleep outside on the dirt?\u00a0 Did you eat raw bear meat, unpasteurized cheese, or a live snail?\u00a0 Please, tell me all about it!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What about ID makes you excited? I love a good medical mystery or diagnostic challenge.\u00a0 Infectious disease specialists are often the experts other physicians turn to when they\u2019re stumped by a patient\u2019s seemingly inexplicable symptoms &#8211; a persistent fever, a perplexing rash, abnormal bloodwork that hints at inflammation in the body no one can seem [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":562,"featured_media":2852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,109,73,66],"tags":[84,3],"class_list":["post-2798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-and-staff","category-faculty-recruitment","category-fun-with-id","category-why-i-love-id","tag-love-id","tag-unmcid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/562"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2798"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2856,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798\/revisions\/2856"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.unmc.edu\/infectious-disease\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}