HonorsMentorship

What I need to know:

     I started my internship on the 8th of September, 2016, at 7:30 pm intending to stay for four to five hours. Ecstatic, I entered the Emergency Room with little knowledge of what to do or what to say. Five minutes in I learn that patient history is vital for diagnosis, that an x-ray is a 2-D image of a 3-D object, and that doctors sometimes wait for patients to “pile-up” and then visit them back to back. In addition, I learn that the heart-rate monitor displays heart rate, oxygen level, and blood pressure. I also learn about the newly implemented SCRIBE system. Scribes are mobile “recorders” that transcribe important information that the doctor or patient say into a computer system. They use a mobile computer that runs on battery to follow the doctor around wherever they go.

The first case we have is a child with a broken arm. As I walk to the patient’s room, everything moves fast around me. Doctors and nurses pass around their charts and walk briskly to their destinations. The room we enter is reasonably sized, but feels small after Doctor Ball, I, and the scribe enter. There are also a few nurses hooking up the heart-rate monitor to the boy. Doctor Ball begins gathering information about the injury and I watch the nurse give the boy a shot of pain medication. The liquid moves slow through the needle and I remember how much I hate needles. The small boy squirms slightly, obviously in pain. The pain from the needle, however, is small in comparison to the pain from his arm. I am standing close to the sliding door as my hands grow clammy. The little boy lets out a small wail of pain. The nurse finishes giving the boy the pain medication. My body grows hot and I feel sick to my stomach. I start walking over to the wall to lean on it, but as I walk, black appears around the rim of my vision and closes in. My legs grow numb and soon all sensation leaves my body. I open my eyes from the ground looking up with blurred vision as doctors and nurses crowd around me. They insert an oxygen tube up my nose and try to get me to speak, but I am so confused. They ask if I can sit up. So I try to and I black out again. Next thing I know I am in a wheelchair. Then there is a gap in what I remember and I am in a hospital bed looking up at the ceiling again as a nurse is placing an IV in my forearm. I am too disoriented to answer anybody’s questions. When I am a little more oriented, I call my mother. She jokes with me for only surviving for thirty minutes and then she starts on her way.

     By the time I leave I am down $250 and am thoroughly embarrassed. Although this is not how I planned on spending my night In the ER I did learn a few things. I learned how intimidating the ER can be for patients and how it is very important to be cheerful to patients and to make them feel at home. Last year for my engineering project, I designed a hospital floor and one of the key elements I learned that architects pay attention to is the aesthetic design of the building. From what wall goes where, to the interior design of each individual room, all of it matters. This being said, it is also important for every staff member to be accommodating and polite, and to fix the issue at hand of course.

After my little trip up in the ER, I spoke with Doctor Ball. He reassured me that fainting in the ER is not uncommon and that I was not the first to do so. He encouraged me to continue on with the internship and to always be sure to bend my legs (as that is believed to have been the cause of my fainting spell). In the long run, I am doing this to gain knowledge about the human body, up close and personal. I do this to gain experience, and each experience in the ER, as anywhere else in life, is important. It not only will help me later on when I start an internship after undergraduate school, but it will help me everyday to have a better understanding of people in general.

     The reason I want to be a doctor is because it is the one job that deals directly with the most basic functions of human beings. Being a doctor is complicated, yet very simple in that doctors fix things on human bodies that are often taken for granted. People generally don’t walk around everyday and wonder if their kidneys are functioning correctly or if their oxygen level is high enough. Everytime I go to my internship, I am reminded of how life works. A person lives, a person dies. Of course, in the long run there is more to it than that, but knowing that makes life all more real.

     Speaking with Doctor Ball these past few months, I have decided that my research topic should focus on a specific area in the body, the abdomen. This is because there are so many systems in the body that it would be impossible for me to thoroughly research all of them. Because of this, the things I want to know and need to know are pointed in the direction of abdominal pain. My essential question reads as follows: How do I assess and treat common complains of abdominal pain in the emergency room. In order to answer this question, I need to know what the five fatal causes of abdominal pain are, how to identify them, and how to treat them. To expand my knowledge on this topic, I also need to know some of the less fatal, but still critical causes of abdominal pain.

Aside from learning all about causes of abdominal pain, in the future I want to know more about how to diagnose and treat conditions not related to the abdomen. Being able to treat a wide range of conditions is what ER doctors are supposed to be able to do. Learning the conditions associated with abdominal pain, however, allows me to be able to treat a variety of conditions because there are so many conditions associated with abdominal pain. When I first started my internship, I knew very little medical terms. I did not know what tachy- and brady- meant when attached to various suffixes. I did not know how to read an EKG or how to read a CT scan. I had never seen an ultrasound in person. Now I have seen and learned all of these things and more.