Week 5:
Hello, Wisconsin!

July 9, 2022

That’s a wrap on Week 5! I can’t believe it’s already the half way point. I guess it must be true: time flies when you’re having fun! This week was packed with so many learning opportunities. We had another journal club gathering that was combined with lecture. The topic for this week was Charles Bonnet Syndrome. As I mentioned in a previous post, Charles Bonnet is a condition that provokes hallucinations post vision loss. Luckily, before we got too far in the project, Dr. St. Louis was able to provide helpful articles and notes that further explained what this disease is! What was really helpful was the real-life situations Dr. St. Louis shared with the group. We learned and circled back to one patient in particular who was the prime example of Charles Bonnet. Dr. St. Louis pointed out a few risk factors for Charles Bonnet Syndrome, and surprisingly, age is not the biggest factor! Females are more likely to develop Charles Bonnet, it seems, as well as individuals who do not live alone.

Along with the risk factors, Dr. St. Louis brought our attention to the hallucinations themselves. It is thought that the hallucinations are not particularly harmful to the individual, and are not usually scary. One of the patient files I was looking at claimed the individual hallucinated turtles! It is also thought that the hallucinations have no personal meaning to the individual. They can be anything, really: geometric shapes, animals, inanimate objects, etc.

One of the biggest points Dr. St. Louis mentioned was the suspected correlation Charles Bonnet Syndrome has with dementia with Lewy Bodies. For our second project, we will be not only looking at Charles Bonnet Syndrome and RSWA, but also Charles Bonnet Syndrome and the link it might have with dementia with Lewy Bodies. I know we will be reading another article this coming week with this correlation as the main topic!

Aside from learning so much about Charles Bonnet Syndrome, Nolan, Dalin and myself all tagged along on Dr. St. Louis’s monthly clinic day in La Crosse, Wisconsin! The 12+ hour day was incredibly insightful and gave each of us an up close and personal view of the work Dr. St. Louis does on his clinic days. One of my favorite parts of the entire day was indulging in delightful conversations with Dr. St. Louis that ranged everywhere from the start of his career and questions impossible to answer like what his favorite aspect of sleep is, all the way to pop culture topics like Star Wars! The car ride to and from La Crosse was filled with a lot of laughter, knowledge, and perspective. I really appreciated how intentional Dr. St. Louis was with his answers. Some of them even made me think about my future career!

In the clinic, we saw upwards of 12 patients! A few of the patients were Zoom meetings which made it really neat to see how adaptive practices have been to our changing world. Each patient presented a difference case. We saw patients that had epilepsy, restless leg syndrome, seizures, and even a few mystery cases! All of the patients were quite characters and amazingly open to having 3 people they didn’t know hear their story. One patient received some heartbreaking news. While it was sad, it allowed Nolan, Dalin, and I to watch excellent bedside manner and well thought-out answers being conveyed to the patient. We also had a patient who seemed to be overjoyed to have a crowd. It was fun to see each how each patient’s personality came out throughout the visit. Overall, one of the things that I was impressed with was the amount of knowledge Dr. St. Louis received and delivered. We had a visit that was close to 2 hours, and Dr. St. Louis was able to take in the meeting in it’s entirety with only a few notes!

I will say that the coolest part, by far, was the amount of brain scans we were able to see. While I don’t have much experience in reading a brain scan, the experience that I do have was enough to orient myself! I was able to understand some of the deficits the patient was having based on the region of the brain the area of concern was. We saw a handful of strokes, tumors, and lesions on the scans. While I enjoyed the privilege of viewing the scans, I think it was just as cool to be able to talk with the doctors and hear their ideas on how to help the patients.

In other activities this week, I continued working on the hypocretin (HCT) project manuscript. The interns are at a bit of a standstill with the project at the moment. We have, unfortunately, run into some negative findings. I’ll be able to update more as the fellowship comes to a close.

I gained a few new skills this past week, too. One of them was learning how to use BlueSky to run statistics on the HCT project. I had never used a software like this so there was a slight learning curve, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly!

My Friday activity this week was going to the movie theatre with Dalin and Ramneek (Dalin’s housemate)! It was so fun to have a girls night out!

This coming week I am looking forward to continuing with the Charles Bonnet Syndrome project. I’m excited to see what kinds of things I learn in journal club, too. Hopefully we are able to make something of the findings for the hypocretin project this week, and if not, it’s alright! The project was enjoyable either way. Fingers crossed for a lucky week!