A day full of presentations! Today, as soon as we got to the medical school we got into our interdisciplinary groups to do a practice run through our presentation. Once we felt good about how we were doing, we got into our other groups for our college fair presentations. This was so much fun! Our tier put together a college fair for Tier I where we each got to represent our universities. I love Furman so I had a lot to say about my amazing college. After we allowed some time for the tier to ask any questions they had, we went to lunch and of course played around the world.
Jada, Courtney, Kesha, and Jen came and talked to us about gap years. I want to talk to Kesha some more about her masters program and Jen about her nursing assistant job.
A few minutes later and it was SHOW TIME. Donors, including Uncle Al, started showing up and the nerves started to kick in for our interdisciplinary board presentations. Being the health equity group, we were assigned to go last. I learned so much from my tier mates during their presentations.
Pediatric Hematology went first and I am glad they did because they did an amazing job reexplaining the case and going through sickle cell disease in detail. Sickle cell disease (SCD) has many side effects and conditions that can result from it. From the hematology perspective, SCD causes tissue damage due to the deforming of erythrocytes. It also blocks blood vessels. This leads to more complications like hemolytic anemia, asplenia, pulmonary hypertension, and meningitis. The treatment the hematology group discussed was hydroxyurea and an antimicrobial prophylaxis like penicillin.
Surgery was next and they also explained everything very well. They focused on the patient’s empyema and priapism. Empyema is a fluid of pus filling the pleural cavity in the lungs which is serious even in stage 1. To treat empyema, the fluid would have to get drained. The three ways that can happen surgically is through 1) thoracentesis- using a needle to reach the lungs. 2) thoracotomy- cutting through the chest to reach lungs. Or 3) using video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) which is a less invasive way to access the lungs through laparoscopy. Priapism is prolonged erection of the penis with no stimulation. This can either be nonischemic or ischemic. Nonischemic is high flow of arterial inflow that can be treated with an ice pack and pressure or surgical ligation (artery repair). Ischemic is low flow of venous outflow that can be treated with aspiration decompression (draining blood with a needle).
OBGYN was next and OMG THEY ALL WORE PINK. LOOK
They are all such girl bosses. I loved that OB was a part of this case study because while pregnant, sometimes the focus can all be on the child and neglect the mother. This group had two concerns in regard to the mother. The first was the risk of having parovarious which is a condition her child has that he likely got as a result of having SCD. Parvovirus can be transmitted through respiratory droplets or through blood. It infects 1-5% pregnant women and about 30% will infect their fetus but most likely the baby will have no complications when born. The other concern that OB wanted to bring up to the mother was to offer her counseling. They thought that both genetic and mental health counseling would benefit the mom. Genetic counseling would offer the mother with all the information possible about the genes of her baby and “promote autonomy” in being informed and in making all her decisions. Mental health counseling would be beneficial in the sense of taking preventative measures since 15-20% of women undergo mental health illness during postpartum and this particular woman is dealing with a lot.
Psychiatric/ adolescent medicine was up next. They focused a lot on finding red flags that the child may be going through mental illness of his own. One indicator of that was when he stated “I am tired of taking medicine, I just want to be normal.” This may not only signal an intolerance with taking medicine but also a sign that the child may need some mental health attention. If the child is diagnosed with depression and not just the emotion of sadness (2 continuous weeks or longer of feeling sad) then one of his treatment options can be cognitive behavioral therapy. Because adolescents are 1.76x more likely to be non-adherent to taking medication, I absolutely love it when Taylor said “it’s important to understand and encourage the patient.” She emphasized the importance of “encouraging the patient to take control of their illness rather than letting the illness take control over them.”
It was finally our turn! Because we were the last group we were already told to hurry up when we went up to present. On my first slide, I had a lot of things to explain which I wrote all down in the speaker notes. I didn’t directly have the computer in front of me and froze up when it was my turn and felt like I repeated myself a lot. When I felt myself getting discouraged I told myself that it’s ok and pushed through. I managed to pull it off pretty well and think we killed our presentation. We focused a lot on whether race should be mentioned as part of the patient history. Our answer was yes, sometimes. Because race is already a huge part of society, it is important to be aware of the races that the patients identify as to understand what they may be affected by. It's important to note that it's not the race that leads to racial disparities, it's the implicit, or sometimes, explicit biases, of others that do.
Overall, I think everyone did such a good job at researching the information, acquiring it, and presenting it in a professional and simple way for everyone to understand. It was also amazing to hear Dr. Linton telling us that our Tier had the best presentations yet.
After our Kaplan class, we all went to the lounge for a MedEx celebratory dinner. The food was yum and I played some more around the world and skittles with my lovely tier mates.
Can’t wait for tomorrow!!
