Sunday, February 28, 2010

So our condo is AMAZING. It has 2 bedrooms - one has a king-size bed (Veronica and Lindsay stay there), one has two twins (thats where Sharon and I are), and the living room has a couch with a queen-size foldout bed (where Pratik is). We have a kitchen and a balcony and have the beach right nextdoor. We decided to rent bikes for the week - its like $25 and we can take bike rides out on the beach.

Hilton Head is gorgeous, and I'm reallllly excited for the clinic tomorrow. I have no idea what to expect, but hopefully I get to work on my Spanish a little :D

Monday, March 1, 2010

This was our first day at the clinic! We were allowed to choose which doctor to shadow - there was an orthopedic surgeon, a cardiologist, a gynecologist, and a couple other doctors. Because my boyfriend's father is a really well-respected OB/GYN, I decided to shadow the gyno because I wanted to see why he chose that as his profession.

Well it turns out the gynecologist was quite a well-renowned doctor. His name is Dr. Breen, who used to be president of the OBGYN association of America. He had a dry sense of humor which I found very appealing, and he regaled me with tales of his youth.

"When I was in medical school," he told me as he prepared the speculum, "We had to make house delivieries. We'd go to a woman's house and deliver a child there - and often she'd have four or five kids, all with different fathers.
Now, the child we'd deliver, we'd have to make up fathers for half the time. My colleagues and I had a professor who really terrified us - his name was **************. Really, really mean guy.
Well, we decided to get a little bit even for the torture he gave us by putting down his name as the father. I don't know if he ever figured out he had a couple dozen illegitimate children."

That's pretty much the best spite story ever. He also used to have tea with Nancy Reagan (Nancy Davis back then) which is also amazing.

Anyway, I was too worried about how good my Spanish was to actually medically translate today, so we brought in a translator. We had a woman talk (in Spanish, which I actually understood!) about how she was worried about breast cysts. She also wanted birth control, and it seems like most of the women around here prefer the Depo shot (cost and appointment issues, you only have to get it once every six months) but Dr. Breen really preferred the pill - he says its better for ovarian and breast health. Dr. Breen also said, after examination (he let me examine too) the breast lumps were normal, and they can be exacerbated by caffeine.

He did a bunch of pap smears, and let me look through the speculum at the cervix. Today was a short day, only a couple hours, so we had the rest of the day off to hang out!

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

So today I got to shadow a hematologist! I've been considering hematology/oncology for a while so this was a treat. I went in with the doctor and we had a patient come in who had an anemia - the doctor started to explain the CBC but I told him I had a medical technology degree so he just said "Oh! Okay, you know how to read it then". I could! I bet Dr. Doig and Dr. Thorne back in the BLD department at MSU would be proud.

Anyway he quizzed me on what would cause a microcytic hypochromic anemia, and I totally forgot (i was kind of bombarded with 20-30 different anemias 2 years ago and can't really keep them straight anymore) and was kind of embarrassed but he said iron deficiency anemia would cause it.

Well the CBC was from a Hispanic woman who actually had an allergy/intolerance to iron supplements. Supposedly she went into anaphylactic shock when they gave her supplements before, although the doctor wondered if it was perhaps something else that caused the shock since Fe allergy is so rare. Well her hemoglobin kept dropping and dropping and apparently she had heavy periods every day too, so we needed to get her on hormones to put her into early menopause since we had no other options.

It was with this patient that I used my Spanish for the first time - she could understand and speak some English but struggled, so when she couldn't articulate something in English I'd ask her to tell me in Spanish to relay to the doctor (and vice versa). It was SO NEAT I didn't even know I knew Spanish still!

Well I was only an hour or two in when Lindsay decided she wanted to try out the H/O, so I trotted off to the massage therapist.

We had a renowned massage therapist/peace activist there, who has a famous picture out there of her holding up a flower to a soldier. Well, as I was waiting for her to arrive, a nurse asked me if I spoke any Spanish because they were trying to get a woman weighed/her vitals and noone was readily available to translate.

I said sure, I can try, and told her "Necesitamos tomar su peso" or "we need to take your weight", "por favor, va a la escala", or "please go to the scale". My Spanish is a bit rusty so I'm still not sure even in hindsight if this is correct still but she understood.

Anyway, so I was just going to stop there, but the nurse told me they were really needing translators today, would I mind going into the room with her? So I said sure, I could go see the massage therapist later, they needed me so I wouldn't mind.

Well, throughout the entire session, I was translating between doctor and patient (with the help of my handy medical dictionary!), which was shocking since I really had no idea I'd retained that much Spanish. At Covenant its small and there are so many bilingual people there that having enough translators really isn't an issue so I've never needed to translate. But here I spent the entire day translating!

Because I'd shadowed the day previous, I knew a lot of the Spanish gynecology words: quistes en el pecho (breast cysts), sangrado uterino (spotting), salud de ovario (ovarian health), etc. I also knew how to say contraceptives, although it was confusing at first because she kept saying "anticontraceptivo" which makes it sound like they want fertility pills, not contraceptive ones. To make sure I always asked if they didn't want a baby, which probably made me sound idiotic, but better safe than sorry.

Anyway that patient left after like 45 minutes, and although I was going to go back to the massage therapist, but more Hispanic patients came in so I just decided to say whatever and stayed there for a while. Dr. T (the OB/GYN) was actually a graduate from Wayne and had a Wayne coat! He told me that I could do a pelvic exam! Unfortunately none of the other patients coming in needed one, but he told me I could do one later in the week.

I hopped over to the massage therapist afterward, since I figured its great to keep an open mind for all medicine. My boyfriend suffers from a lot of back and neck aches and I figured I could at least talk to the massage therapist about it, since ibuprofin usually doesn't do much.

Well the massage therapist was amazingly helpful, and her patient seemed like the happiest person in the world while she did her work. She had a really thorough knowledge of anatomy, and showed me which muscles and nerves to work to remedy certain aches and pains. She gave me her number to call her if I needed to ask any more questions - I really enjoyed spending time shadowing her, and it really helped shed light on the myomassologist profession.

Well, thats all I'll write for now, I'm not sure what we're doing for dinner tonight but I think I'm going to go bike on the beach :)

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Today was a short day! There was a dermatologist in, and since my dermatologist was what got me interested in medicine initially, I really wanted to shadow him. Well, it turned out Lindsay wanted to as well, which apparently wasn't an issue since the doctor was fine with more than one student being in the room. However, there was also a nursing student who wanted to shadow too, and he still said it was fine. So, all 3 girls sat on the examining table and watched as patients came in.

It was actually pretty neat, since the nursing student (Nicole) and I were able to translate for the doctor. I had thought initially that the patients would be very unsettled by there being 3 students in the room, but most of the patients were male and seemed pretty tickled that 3 girls were smiling and paying attention to them.

It seemed that many people suffered from keratosis pilaris - something I used to have actually! When the patients asked what could cure it, the doctor said there wasn't much you could do other than treat it, and sometimes it went away on its own. Mine pretty much did, which gave the patients some hope.

There was also some guy who came in who was just covered, head to toe, with this terrible rash. It didn't itch or anything, it was just everywhere. The doctor wasn't sure what it was, and made him go over what changes to his diet he had made recently, since he said he made a major overhaul to his diet around the time this rash flared up. Needless to say, it was, and still is, a mystery to what has caused this.

Anyway, afterwards I went over to talk to the infectious disease guy - now that was amazing. He's the only doctor who has been able to successfully treat Naegleria fowlerii without neurological consequences. For those who don't know, Naegleria fowlerii is known as the "brain-eating amoeba", which I learned about in parasitology in undergrad. Naegleria also is very similar to my last name - Nagler - which makes me give it special attention as well.

N. fowlerii has about a 99% mortality rate - and the doctor, Dr. Brown, had a patient come in comatose after complaining of a headache the day before. He had been waterskiing in a lake with warm, stagnant water - the perfect breeding ground for Naegleria. Well, Dr. Brown administered huge amounts of amphoteracin into the patient, and 48 hours later the patient was up and fine. I was amazed by this story! It really made me want to consider infectious disease as a career path.

Friday, March 5, 2010

I didn't have time to write a log yesterday since we went out to dinner. However, today was CRAZY.

There was a surgeon in today for a patient with a lipoma. 3 of us really wanted to go see it so we guessed a number between 1 and 10 each. I won with my favorite number 3!! Sooo I met the doctor, who I impressed by knowing what fenestrated was (and defenestrated), and he decided that since I got the joke and knew some Spanish too I could SCRUB IN FOR SURGERY!!

I really loved this doctor. He was very sarcastic and crass and just absolutely wonderful. He let me help with the stitching and let me feel into the pocket where we had taken out the lipoma, which was a crazy tumor which looked just like a water balloon. It had popped out of where we had made the cut. He put it in a plastic container for me to show my friends!

We also burned off the warts on peoples' feet, and then other students started knocking at the door saying my time was up. The surgeon kept making me tell them that I couldn't leave yet (since he didn't want me to!) but Lindsay and Veronica needed the experience too, so I acquiesced and wandered off.

Well, with nothing else to do, I wandered over to another hallway. Dr. T was back! He had promised me last time I could do a full pelvic exam!

So, I asked him if it was possible if I could try it. He was so nice! He told me of course I could, and I used this neat disposable speculum with a light that pops inside it. It was crazy being able to feel the ovaries and everything! The woman was totally okay with it, she was my age and had a child.

Anyway, I just did more medical translation for the rest of the day. Then, when we were all done with the clinic, we went out kayaking with dolphins! It was SO COOL. The guy who led the tour, he was actually from Michigan and seemed to really enjoy hanging out with the 5 of us. We had a 15 dollar off coupon, and he let us use it for all of us. And since there were only us 5, he said we could stay out as late as we wanted.

We actually wound up following an adult dolphin and young dolphin who would come play and jump along our kayaks. We stayed out there for 3 and a half hours, even though it was supposed to be 2. It was so pretty! Our guide took us along the sides of the lake to see the beautiful big houses there, and the houses that belonged to the Gullahs, which were the descendents of slaves. Most of them lived in poverty but on multi-million dollar pieces of land that they didn't want to relinquish.

We kayaked until the sun set, and then went out for karaoke. We met some people from South Carolina, and stayed out til late singing and dancing!

It was such an amazing day, and such an amazing trip!