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Pediatric Cardiologist

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It was Dr. Robert Campbell's interest in physical fitness that led to him become a pediatric cardiologist.

"I went to a small high school for boys in western North Carolina," says Dr. Campbell. "I played virtually all sports and was very interested in health, conditioning, fitness and physical performance. I guess I really wanted to be in sports medicine. However, at that time sports medicine was orthopedic surgery.

"Once I entered medical school, I was fascinated with the heart and [the chief of pediatric cardiology] took me under his wing. From there, I never turned back."

Dr. Campbell is now the chief of cardiac services at the Sibley Heart Center in Atlanta, Georgia. He says one of the most rewarding aspects of this career is being able to help patients over the long term.

"Personally for me, it's the longitudinal follow-up of children form birth to young adulthood," says Dr. Campbell. "Seeing patients survive, cope and finally thrive with complex heart disease, that in previous years might have been surgically and medically unmanageable.

"It's also rewarding to see technological advances, both for diagnosis and treatment, advancing the field," Dr. Campbell adds. "There is no end in sight to new technology. Maybe someday we will figure out what causes congenital heart defects and be able to prevent them."

Dr. Cheryl Cammock had always enjoyed working with children. That's why she went into pediatrics. While doing her pediatric residency she knew she wanted to specialize in something, but she wasn't sure what.

"When I did my cardiology rotations I started to know more about the anatomy and physiology of the heart, and that drew me to it," says Dr. Cammock.

Dr. Cammock suggests young people take courses in heart anatomy and physiology, if possible, to see if they share the fascination she felt when she was first exposed to it.

"I used to interview fellows (medical graduates doing fellowships)," says Dr. Cammock. "They all would say the same thing about why they chose it -- and that is they love the anatomy, they love the physiology."

A love of heart anatomy helps you endure all the years of training that are required to become a pediatric cardiologist.

"If a student happened to be exposed to [heart physiology] early and they really, really loved it, then that's probably the one who would buckle down and stay with it if they wanted to go through medicine," says Dr. Cammock.

"I can strongly recommend pediatrics to everybody, whatever subspecialty," says pediatric cardiologist Dr. Simon Urschel. "And if you're more of a technical person, then pediatric cardiology is probably one of the best things to do."

Pediatric cardiology is a very demanding profession. It's full of tough decisions. Patients' lives often hang in the balance.

"Particularly pediatric cardiology means that some of your patients won't survive," says Dr. Urschel. "Some of them are really, really sick and it's often not easy to deal with the families, particularly if you have children of your own. Then you can quite well feel the situations that the parents get into.

"Sometimes decisions are really hard and are difficult," Dr. Urschel adds. "And if it ends up with somebody dying or somebody being really sick, you always wonder."

Being able to make decisions under that kind of pressure is an essential part of this career.

"Particularly if you cover ICU (intensive care unit) then you have a lot of really critically ill patients and they get ill really, really fast and you don't have as much time to deal with it, and that's pretty stressful," says Dr. Urschel.

Along with tremendous stress, however, come tremendous rewards.

"Overall, the work in pediatrics is always very rewarding," says Dr. Urschel. "Because the moment that the children do well again after you do something... they're just back to normal children -- they start playing, they start doing everything like other children."

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