Week 3:
The Project Gets Revamped

July 2, 2017

Turns out 7,000 patient records isn’t such a feasible goal after all. After spending the end of last week and beginning of week 3 working through charts, I found it would not be realistic to get through a whole year. At the end of the internship, all interns give a presentation about their project and findings. In order to have findings to present, we had to come up with a new plan. We have decided to take a random sample of patients from the last two years. Now, I have about 2,500 patient charts to get through.

Revamping the project required more critical thinking. Since we are studying athletes, we wanted our sample to include athletes of all sports seasons. The sample also needed to include non-athletes as well so that a comparison can be made. Simply, we had to ensure the sample was representative of the population. The busiest months for sports medicine and orthopedics are March to May and August to November. Summer months when kids are not in school are full of fracture cases, but not necessarily athletes. Because of this, our sample will consist of about 1,200 patients from the seven busiest sports medicine months and about 1,200 from the remaining months of this year. This should allow our sample to be representative of both athletes and non-athletes.

I was also able to do another shadow this week. This week I shadowed and orthopedic physician’s assistant. Since I currently want to be a physician’s assistant myself, I was very much looking forward to this opportunity. I was amazed at how similar the two shadows were. In a clinical setting, a doctor’s job and a physician assistant’s job are the same. They both are responsible with looking at x-rays, evaluating the patient, and formulating a treatment plan. I was able to ask lots of questions and get a really good idea about the PA career. I love the idea that I could practice in any specialty, changing whenever I want or need without having to go back to school. This particular shadow has really made me believe becoming a PA is the best choice for me.

Thankfully the project was figured out before the holiday weekend, allowing me to take a long weekend. My family drives from Illinois to Idaho every summer to visit our aunt, uncle, and cousins who live there. They were nice enough to take a slight detour through Denver to pick me up and take me with. Being able to spend the 4th of July with my family was a great surprise.

I arrived in Idaho on Saturday afternoon. After a long car ride, we spent our first day catching up and relaxing. Sunday, though, started early. My family here lives on a ranch-type property and own a couple horses. Almost every morning we are here, we get up and ride for a couple hours. I still get nervous, so I don’t go very fast. After riding, a group of us went to the foothills to go hiking. I have never been to the foothills but it was great practice for hiking the mountains in Colorado soon!

The first part of next week I will still be in Idaho. We will be floating the river, hiking, and riding the horses some more while I am here. I was able to talk with the doctor I am working with, who is going to let me shadow her in clinic. Being a sports medicine doctor, she works closely with physical therapists and is going to work on getting me some shadow opportunities in that department as well. Because of the holiday though, those shadows will likely occur in the coming weeks. I haven’t ruled out becoming a physical therapist quite yet, so I am very excited for more shadows!