Gimme a J!

I haven't done a good ode to Dada in a while, and it just so happens that the last couple of days have produced quite a bit of material to his credit. He's a pretty awesome dude, as it happens.

It all started this morning, when instead of the usual creaking of the bedroom door to alert me that E was awake, I heard her little voice from her bed instead, just like the good old days. But, unlike the good old days, the voice was calling "Dada?" And then a sing-song "Daaaa-daaa!" Hm. Dada slept at the hospital last night, so he was not going to be answering her call. I went in, and she hid her disappointment fairly well. In any case, she wanted to see Dada, and the idea of waiting until after school seemed like FOREVER. It was sweet. She informed me that she REALLY wanted Dada to be there to pick her up from school so that she could show him the bugs in her classroom that I got to see yesterday. A couple of crickets and a really cool blue horn worm. I told her that we could arrange for Dada to pick her up, no problem. And that made her happy.

At dinner time, Dada showed us a card he had received from a patient today. It was an older gentleman who had been hospitalized last month for pneumonia. He is Vietnamese, and understands some English but doesn't speak much. Regardless, J did his best every day to spend time chatting with him so that he could understand what was happening, and to make sure that he was alright. His family would visit him often, and J would take the time to explain everything to them as well. When was the last time you wrote a thank-you note to a doctor? What if I told you that this is actually the second thank-you note he has received in his modest 14 month career? And that he's also received a note from an attending about how much the medical and nursing staff enjoyed having him rotate with them? I'm about as proud as he is special.

But the very best part of the day, maybe the week, and quite possibly the whole month, came when E began asking J about what he did to help the man who wrote the card. This developed into her asking what he did last night at work, and started probing for details about injection sites and bacterial infections and poorly-controlled diabetes. For every answer, she had another question, and for every question, Dr. Dada was only to happy to give a more detailed answer. It was, I think, the cutest thing I've ever seen.