Student Blogs

Week 4: Weekend Update and Da Vinci

June 28th, 2013 etcare14

Hey all,

Couple updates from where the last post left off before I get into this one. Taking a road trip down to the City of Brotherly Love to see the New York Mets play the Philadelphia Phillies this past weekend was a lot of fun. We had perfect weather for a ballgame and Philadelphia has a cool stadium. The Mets played a good game, mounting a comeback before losing in a walk off. I also came really close to catching a foul ball, but it unfortunately didn’t happen. I then a little wiffleball with some friends on Sunday before driving back up to Hartford with my family.

I spent all of Monday in the emergency room here in Hartford. It was an interesting and exciting experience, pretty different than what I have been seeing in other areas of the hospital where I normally have been working. Never knowing what you would see next and encountering wildly different issues back to back was exciting. I already have experience in my local EMS and am pretty interested in emergency medicine, so having background and interest going in certainly helped me. I spent all day in the ER and worked through lunch, so afterward I got back and ate a bunch of the food I brought back from home before taking a solid nap. Overall this change of pace was one of my most exciting and enjoyable days so far at my internship. I hope to spend a few more days in the ER before the summer is out.

Today I spent the morning with my physician mentor in his office as he saw patients in that setting. It’s nice to start to get to know the other doctors, nurses, physician assistants, and receptionists that work in his office. I’ve gotten familiar with them and where everything is, which is really helpful.

This afternoon we had our weekly seminar, which was run by a representative from Da Vinci surgical robots. These Da Vinci machines are highly advanced and minimally invasive surgical robots. They have arms similar to those in laparoscopic surgery, but are operated through the physician sitting at and looking through a console a few feet away. You can look them up online- very cool, but kind of hard to describe without a picture. The representative described for us the technologies and capabilities of these robots, which were pretty impressive. He let us all take it for a test drive, using the console to essentially thread needles through a pincushion. They were pretty sensitive and smooth, but you can imagine my fear when one of the arms of the more than $2 million machine stopped working. Luckily he described how the machine prevents itself from doing what might be a dangerous motion. Despite that scare, it was an interesting and fun presentation.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s plans and those for the weekend.

The view from our seats in Philadelphia


ETC

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