I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud of my Mom as I was this morning.

I don’t know what it was that got me to go to the pediatric morning report today; I was on call last night, and I was seriously dragging by the time I signed everyone back in this morning. For some reason, though, I went. The child that was being discussed was a teenage boy who had presented with acute mental status changes and bleeding gums, and it was eventually determined that he had thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (or TTP). The rest of the discussion focused on the salient teaching points of TTP, and at one point, my chief resident made an offhand remark that she was using “the big hematology textbook” as her primary reference for the talk. Through my tired fog, all I heard was that sentence, and a little bell went off in my head, with the realization that my Mom wrote the chapter on TTP in what’s considered to be the authoritative heme textbook. At that point, I reached over the table and took the stack of papers from next to my chief, and sure enough, on the top was my Mom’s chapter.

Dude…. my Mom’s smart and shit.