The principal investigator (PI) I was paired with for this internship is Dr. Valentine, and she specializes in baby hips. My project for the summer is a retrospective study investigating how the socioeconomic status and geographic location where a family of a patient lives affect the diagnosis and treatment of children with developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH). This information will help Children's with their outreach and hopefully end up with more patients coming in earlier and receiving less invasive treatment. On the daily, this involves a lot of computer time, looking at patients charts and recording different information about their demographics, referral, and treatment into a database. Sometimes it gets a little tedious, but it’s easy for me to see the value in the work I’m doing, and the other interns and I try to break up the week and go to different lectures being given on campus. We also got to go to a Rockies baseball game one day, and they even won! Which if you follow baseball at all, you know that the Rockies are awful this year, so that was a big deal.
All the interns at a Rockies game; Working from home with the sweetest work buddy!
One of the perks of this internship is the shadowing opportunities. The program leaders of the internship set up and schedule about 20 hours of shadowing in orthopedics for each intern. This includes shadowing in the OR and the clinic. I got to start shadowing last week, which has been amazing! I’ve been in the OR a lot these past couple weeks and have seen a few hardware removals, an Achilles lengthening procedure, and drilling into the femoral head to increase blood flow to dying bone. I also got to shadow a pulmanologist in the clinic, which is some outside shadowing that I set up, and am hoping to shadow an oncologist this week. Everyone has been so kind and helpful throughout the process of shadowing. What was surprising to me is how laid back the doctors seem. When emailing a surgeon to let them know you’re scheduled to shadow them or trying to set up shadowing they’ll respond to your email in an informal tone. It’s kind of funny to see because they’re doctors, they have all this education and a big title, but it helps put me at ease and remember they’re also just people.
Getting ready to shadow in the OR!
In my down time I’ve tried to get into the mountains as much as possible and keep exploring Denver and the surrounding towns. Some of my recent adventures include going to see Pirates of the Caribbean at Red Rocks with some friends from this internship, celebrating my friend Alyza’s birthday by getting a pizza and driving up a mountain to watch the sunset, and my friend Zoe and I camping last weekend! It’s been amazing to get to meet up with friends for most of these adventures, and I’m very lucky to have people I know from Cornell that live close; but I’ve also been trying to get more confident with doing things on my own. I live alone, so I’m forced into that a lot. It gets lonely sometimes, and I’ve been figuring out how I deal with that the best. Sometimes it’s nice to distract myself and go for a hike/walk, watch a movie, or read, but other times, I’ve realized I need to embrace being alone and the silence. I’ve also come to realize that even though I live alone, I’m not actually alone. I’ve made a community here in Colorado with the other interns, and I have friends and family back in Iowa who support me and are always down to call or facetime.
Pizza with a view! + Solo post work hike
Weekend camping trip with Zoe!