Week 8:
A Mini Summary

July 30, 2022

The internship may be closing next week, but there was definitely no shortage of work to do this week. If I had sum up this week in a cute little package, it would be that this week was a review of all previous seven weeks put together, compiling all the tasks that we have worked on thus far into five days.

In the lab, the primary thing that we worked on was the Charles Bonnet project. When there were less available files to score and review, we worked on the manuscript. I focused on the neurophysiological link between RSWA & Charles Bonnet Syndrome. While the field is still in discovering new concepts, I was able to find several papers suggesting potential causes of Charles Bonnet Syndrome, though there are no direct studies confirming the exact cause of RSWA. By compiling the conclusions of several studies, I was able to piece together a web of potential neuroanatomical causes for RSWA resulting from Charles Bonnet Syndrome that I checked with Dr. St. Louis and will hopefully be of value to the paper.

As with most of the research experience, this week also consisted of file scoring and reviewing. However, this week was much more difficult, as the files that were being unarchived from Mayo’s database were often difficult to analyze for muscle activity. This could be due to a lot of things, but the primary reason for the muscle activity quality was the process of archiving the files from the Mayo database. Although Olivia worked hard to unarchive in a timely manner so that we had no shortage of work to do, the process of putting the sleep files in a compatible form between Hypnolab (the muscle scoring software) and the primary software that the sleep files are stored (Natus) is tedious. I learned this firsthand, as one of our tasks this week was attempting to learn how to unarchive. We still do not have security access for this, so we used our supervisors’ credentials to unarchive files. Initially, it seems like this is going well. However, due to the technological limitations we found on archiving ultimately unsuccessful due to slow computer limitations.

We also continued to patient chart. As we went through the scoring files, we learned of bad muscle leads and other small things that made the files unscorable. This meant that we needed to go back through Mayo’s database and find patients to match controls for the Charles Bonnet subjects that we have previously scored. As issues with individuals came up, we needed to charge them and report their data to Olivia to unarchive the file to score. As I stated before, patient charting is my favorite part of the normal tasks in the lab, so this was an enjoyable process.

While it may be Week 8, we saw that we still haven’t found all the ways to have fun in Rochester. One fun thing that the interns in the lab did was create a Spotify playlist to listen to while scoring. We all put a couple songs that we really liked on a playlist and listened to them together. We then rated each song out of 10 to let everyone know how they liked it, listening and scoring over a two-day period on Tuesday and Wednesday. Technically according to scores, I have the worst music taste, but I will chalk it up as bad research due to a non-diverse study.

I also was able to have another shadowing experience this week. I shadowed Dr. Arghami in the cardiovascular surgery clinic. He met with several patients to discuss surgery, which included likelihood of success, options for different surgeries, and steps needed to improve the recovery outcomes of their operations. These clinic visits were much shorter than the ones I shadowed in neurology. Though they were shorter, they were not too short, getting every bit of information Dr. Arghami needed to successfully complete care. Dr. Arghami explained each of the procedures that he would do using a diagram. One of the coolest ones he explained was replacing the aortic valve and the base of the aorta leaving the heart. I also was allowed to listen to the hearts of some patients with mitral valve issues, hearing the anatomical problem in real time. The clinic visit combined with the shadowing experience I had with Dr. Arghami previously has made me even more confident in my career path to become a surgeon. I made sure to thank Dr. Agami for allowing me to shadow him, and I think I learned a lot from both the experiences over the past couple weeks.

Thursday brought another bonding day for the lab. We walked around Rochester Downtown, playing some foosball that we hadn’t noticed the past few weeks, as well smelling all the good food that we couldn’t eat because we had already eaten our own lunches that we packed. Dalin, Makayla, and I also went to Crumbl Cookies and tried their weekly selection. All of us had never gone to this cookie place before, and it was a fun bonding experience as well as a tasty way to end the week.