Week 1:
Jumping into the Deep End

June 17, 2017

I arrived in Rochester on Friday. My mom and I drove from Chicago, which was about a 5 and a half hour drive. I am living in the home of a woman named Barbara who has been working at the Mayo Clinic for the past 21 years. My mom and I spent the weekend exploring the city of Rochester. As we were walking around, we both picked up fast that this is a very educational environment. There are a few universities in Rochester, along with the post-grad programs and medical school at Mayo. I could already tell by my first day in Rochester that this summer would be an incredibly enlightening experience.

My first day at Mayo was Monday June 12. The Center for Sleep Medicine is in the Gonda building on the 17th floor. The Gonda building is buzzing with patients and medical professionals, all going about their daily activities. Once I got a tour around the Mayo campus, I visited the Center for Sleep Medicine and met most of the 8 other interns that I will be working with this summer. Over lunch, we went to a presentation called the Medical Grand Rounds. This is a forum for physicians to give presentations on their research or other topics that they think are pertinent. Medical Grand Rounds are every Monday and Wednesday. After lunch, Dr. McCarter, a Neurology resident, gave me an in-depth overview on REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) and sleep in general. RBD is characterized by REM sleep without atonia and dream enactment, typically nightmarish dreams. RBD can be very dangerous to the patient and their sleeping partner, and is also closely linked with the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and dementia with lewy bodies. Once Dr. McCarter was done giving his talk about RBD, I jumped right into learning how to score polysomnograms (PSGs). Scoring is the process of analyzing a PSG from a patient’s sleep study. Dr. St. Louis’ lab has a specific method for scoring the PSGs, marking specific muscle movement events as either tonic or phasic. Phasic muscle movement is short and strong, where tonic muscle movement is short and weak. I think I learned more in my first day at Mayo than I have ever learned in my entire life.

I spent the rest of the week reading articles about RBD and practicing scoring PSGs. Every week we are going to have a Journal Club, which consists of all of the interns and research assistants sitting down and discussing a number of articles. This week’s Journal Club was mostly about RBD and what we know thus far. Dr. St. Louis does a very good job in making sure that we know what is going on, and why these particular things may be happening. Some of the other interns and I also got to sit down with Dr. St. Louis and get a lecture on sleep. I felt very confident about the information on sleep, because I have taken Psychology and Anatomy and Physiology at Cornell. I feel that these courses provided me with crucial information to understanding this intricate process. Dr. St. Louis periodically stops in each day to catch up with our progress, and sometimes to even tell us about an interesting case he saw for that day.

On Friday, I had a very informative and eye-opening day. Over lunch, I went to the weekly Neurology conference, where two physicians presented a Morbidity and Mortality review (MMR). This experience was incredibly interesting, because about 20-30 Neurologists were in a room, discussing what went wrong during the case and how this could be prevented. It was very enlightening to sit in on a number of physicians collaborating to make their practice more effective and efficient. I have never had an experience like this before my time at Mayo. I also had the opportunity to have a one-on-one meeting with Dr. St. Louis on Friday. We talked about my goals for the summer, and the outcomes I am looking to get out of my fellowship. He introduced me to the possible project I will be working on this summer and hopefully through next year during my gap-year between Cornell and medical school. The project will look at the differences or similarities between muscle tones of women with RBD versus men with RBD. I am very excited to pursue this project and dive right in!

At this time, I am feeling incredibly thankful for this opportunity. This week has been one of the most insightful weeks of my life. I cannot wait to see what the rest of my time at Mayo has in store for me.