Week Five:
Children’s Hospital Colorado Center for Gait Movement and Analysis

July 27, 2015

Something amazing happened this week. I am 99.7% done with data entry. That would have been 100% but I really wanted to make my tacky end of the week aerobics class so I had to leave before entering the last six patients. So close! I am incredibly excited to have the data in so we can start getting down to the analysis and writing the paper!

Like most of my weeks, the majority of my time was spent in front of my computer. Not too exciting, but I do have one adventure to tell you all about.

As part of the internship, the hospital arranged shadowing opportunities. Many programs do not do this. Children’s (what we call the hospital) certainly does not have to offer shadowing, in fact, it can be a liability for them. But they do! And all of us interns are forever grateful. I requested all sorts of cool things to shadow. The one I was most excited for was a spine surgery. But, as it turns out, interns are not allowed to shadow spine surgeries. Any surgery has a risk of an infection. The more people that are coming and going in an operating room (OR), and the more people in the room to begin with, the higher the risk of infection. Now if you get an infection from a minor surgery or procedure, for instance, an infection on your skin from stitches, its relatively treatable. But, a spine infection? Not so much. Spine infections can be deadly. Sadly, for me this meant no spine surgery to observe. Instead, I was scheduled to go the Spine Clinic. Still cool! Don’t get me wrong, I was looking forward to it, but it’s not surgery.

Do you remember as a kid being jealous of your friends’ vacations? Say, they went to the water park, or Disneyland, and you’d never been? Pure jealously. Well, as all my fellow interns got to go to Disneyland, I mean the operating room, I was getting pretty jealous! They had seen hip surgery, neurosurgery, amputations, reattachments, all sorts of cools stuff! The whole time I was sitting in my office, not wearing comfy scrubs, entering data. In the medical intern world, watching a surgery is like getting to go to the set of your favorite sitcom or upcoming movie. Everyone wants to go!

So, in my jealousy, I placed a very nice call to the woman who organizes all the shadowing and very nicely asked if I could switch my spine clinic for a surgery, any surgery. And low and behold, sure! (Lauryn, if you are reading this: you are an amazing human being.) Turns out the spine clinic was actually under booked the day I was scheduled to shadow and she was considering cancelling it anyway. The very next day, the surgery gods smiled upon me. A surgeon called our department and said he had an open spot for an intern.

I spent almost all of Friday in the O.R. and I had a blast! (Not commonly said after a day in the OR.) I saw two full surgeries. As always, I can only share minimal detail because of patient privacy laws. The first was a hardware removal. The surgeon  removed three 7-9″ screws from a knee that had been broken during a sports practice. The second was a forearm fracture. This one really showed me that surgery is not a delicate process, like you see on TV, at all. To fix this fracture the doctor hammered a long metal rod up the radius. Insert into bone, hammer ten times as hard as possible, x-ray, repeat until rod is fully up arm. I cringed the whole time.

Overall, it was a great, fun week! To keep the fun going and continue to miss out on getting 8 full hours of sleep, I went out with two of my fellow interns on Saturday and met up with a fellow Cornellian on Sunday!