Second Weekly Reflection

And just like that, we are finished with the second week of senior project, and only have two whole days left! What? That is so crazy to me, it feels like we just started. Before I know it, I will be walking across the stage at graduation, and I will officially be done with Proctor. Now that makes me upset! I have really enjoyed senior project, like a lot. Teige and I have been having a blast watching surgeries online and working with Diane Fowler at Ragged Mountain Physical Therapy across the street from campus. This is making me very excited to go into medicine, I can hardly wait. Well, actually, I can, I do not really want to go to med school at the moment. Anyways, I feel like I learned a lot this week, even though we did a lot of the same stuff that we did last week. First off, I learned how to read over a patients chart in physical therapy. Although it was not that hard, you really just read, it was still such a cool experience to have. I feel more professional! I learned what all the different valve replacements of the heart are like, and they are all very similar, just in different locations of the heart. I also learned, which I guess I could have inferred, that you can replace two valves at the same time. For all I know, you can replace three valves at the same time. I also learned the benefits and disadvantages of the two different ways to replace a hip: anterior or posterior. Anterior is better in the long wrong because it does not do much damage to the muscles surrounding the hip, while you have to cut through muscles during a posterior operation. I loved what we were doing this week, especially working at the PT place with Diane. We just always have so much fun there, joking around with Diane as she pushes us around, but not in a bad way! She just really wants us to learn as much as we can with her, which is honestly really awesome of her. The only thing that did not go as expected was the fact that I could not speak during some of the days because of the musical, but honestly, it was not even that bad. It made it a lot funnier, I even used text to speech on my phone to communicate. Like I said before, this week has made me really excited for working in medicine, and has also helped us along with our goals. We watched plenty of surgery that helped advance our knowledge in cardiothoracic surgery, and just surgery in general. We also just wanted to experience what working with Diane would be like, and how she does her job, how she decides how to treat patients, how she can figure out what would be best for them. It was super fun week, and I am looking forward to these last couple of days.