Seventh Week

This is perhaps my last week of full rotations. Beginning next week, I'm cutting down some rotations because I need to finish my final paper by the end of next weekend.

Other than that, week highlights:
Monday-I was shadowing a heptalogist in a Hepatitis clinic because my HIV rotation had ended. Very similar to the HIV clinic except patients are coinfected with Hepatitis and HIV. I heard an interesting statistic that African Americans have a lower recovery rate compared to Caucasians when using interferons (what is used to treat hepatitis), which suggests that genetics may also account for medical disparities. At night, I was volunteering in NYP and I observed an orthopedic surgeon putting casts on 3 patients. Very cool site because there were about 4 different types of doctors in the room doing their own thing to help the patient.

Tuesday-During my neurology rotation in NYP, a patient came in that is a doctor at Mt. Sinai and a Cornell alum. She was sharing stories with the neurologist on how the doctors would torture her during interviews. In the afternoon, I was at Woodhull shadowing a physiatrist in a prosthetic clinic. I never realized how deadly diabetes was until that day because 3 patients came in with amputated legs and we were trying to help them walk again with a prosthetic.

Wednesday-We had a lecture by Dr. Storey-Johnson who is the Sr. Associate Dean of Education at Weill Cornell. She was telling us about the 3 components of medical training: formal, informal, and hidden. I think the most interesting of all of them is the hidden aspect, which is the hidden meaning hospitals relay such as signs posted in only certain languages and the individuals that are selected for rounds.

Thursday-Saw another mouse perfusion for the 4th week in a row in my neurobiology research rotation. I'm starting to get used to the idea of headless mice..After we were done, I was taking pictures of stained brain sections using a camera-microscope for densitometry. The density is measured using a program called ImageJ, which the numbers are then put into a statistical software to determine if it is significant.

Friday-I was shadowing a rheumatologist at Woodhull and we encountered a patient who couldn't move his head at all after falling from a tree several years ago. The doctor had a medication to treat him that's about $1,000/month, but the patient is uninsured and he's planning to move back to Panama in several weeks. He was given the choice to stay and treat his condition if he's eligible for free medications from the hospital or go to Panama and hope that they have the medications he needs.

This week I also completed some of my NYC goals such as running across the Brooklyn Bridge and back. It's a lot shorter than I remembered, I think it took about 10 minutes just to go one-way. Also, I saw a movie being filmed yesterday called "arthur". Check it out whenever it comes out, the scene I saw was between City Hall and NYPD.