This past couple weeks have seen me completely sleep deprived, stuck in traffic for hours a day, sunburnt, stressed, and a couple hundred dollars poorer in gas money.  It’s also been one of the most amazing weeks ever.  I’ve been shadowing an old collegue of my parents’ as part of my training at Children’s Hospital in Seattle.  It’s so odd walking down the hall and having people know me without knowing them.  I’ve been hugged, bombarded with questions, and told MANY stories of funny things i did when visiting work with my parents as a small child.  I recognise a lot of faces and names as contacts my parents keep for any sort of medical advancements and trials that they can get sent to their clinics for cheap; it is very odd walking down the same halls as my parents 10 years ago chatting with the same people about much the same thing.  As of this afternoon I completed my first round of Aquatherapy with Ben, a little boy who has to relearn how to walk after treatment for a bone cancer.  It was so difficult to see this tiny little boy trying so hard to do something everyone else takes for granted whilst feeling nothing but pain the whole time.  I felt guilty for being the one telling him how he only had a little further to go, and how easy it was, and how good it’ll feel later on as i stood next to him perfectly stable and without pain. After that session when I was dried and changed I wandered around the hospital a while and explored all the differences between it and the small clinics of my childhood.  Our clinics were always so filled with such natural sounds as people chatting, people crying, orders being shouted and feet shuffling along the worn floors.  Children’s wasn’t like that… there was a constant beeping from machines, alarms going off, pages buzzing, overhead systems calling doctors, tvs, radios.  I had never realised how loud everything is compared to the clinics, it did make me homesick in a way. I know a lot of people couldn’t imagine what life would be like without tvs, radios, phones, and pagers but I honestly think I prefer it that way.