Babies and cream cheese

While on call one night, I was paged by a nurse about a neonate. The nurse asked if I could come and examine the baby, since the father was extremely worried. The reason? He had dropped cream cheese on the baby's head.Naturally, my first clinical question over the phone was, “Regular,soft, or whipped?” I made my way to the scene, where the anxious parent filled in the details. “I was trying to spread the cream cheese on abagel,” he said, “but it slipped from the knife.” At this point, I had to use every ounce of energy to prevent from breaking out into uncontrollable laughter. I held myself back, however, and proceeded to assess the mechanism of injury. Fortunately, it was only soft cream cheese, and the baby survived the ordeal unscathed. I assured the father that the baby was fine, and that compared to the trauma of a normal spontaneous vaginal delivery, the baby's encounter with the fermented milk would not be a problem.I also told him that for this exact reason, as part of our normal anticipatory guidance to parents of newborns, we only recommend having whippedcream cheese in the house in order to prevent any serious injury to newborns.