Student Blogs

Week 8/9: Weekend and finishing up

July 31st, 2013 etcare14

Hello all, sorry for the radio silence, but it has been a busy last few days here. Last Thursday I went to a meeting about patient safety in the hospital, which correlated well with a book I was reading at the time, called “Why Hospitals Should Fly”, by John Nance. The book was all about systems engineering lessons learned from aviation and applying them to design more efficient and safer healthcare organizations. Through this meeting it was interesting to get to see some more of the administrative side of things. Last Friday I finished up a much smaller project on posterior component separation procedures before heading up to Holy Cross for the weekend. That made two fully completed research projects on the summer, which I would consider pretty successful.

I had a fun weekend up at Holy Cross, catching up with friends and relaxing on campus. It was really good both nights to hang out and catch up with some friends I had not seen in a while. Additionally, I made two successful trips down the hill to Culpepper’s, went for a nice campus run, and went to mass on Sunday in the Jesuit residence to round out a successful weekend. In the last 2 weeks I have gone from zero visits to Ciampi in my Holy Cross career to two, which is my fun fact for the week.

This week so far I have gotten going on a third project, this one on applying transversus abdominis plane (TAP) blocks to hernia repairs. TAP blocks are a type of local anesthetic procedure used to help block pain following abdominal surgery. Before the study goes to a full blown clinical research trial, I am documenting some earlier cases to help form the protocol. I am particularly looking to find out what sample size will be needed for the trial to have effective statistical power. I am enjoying reading about different medicines and anesthetics and how they are used in the surgical sphere. Hopefully I can finish that up before my internship is over, if not by the end of the week.

Tonight a bunch of the interns and I went out to play some minigolf (putt- putt as some might like to call it) out in Farmington, CT. Six of us joined and we split up into threes for 36 holes of some pretty competitive fun. We finished up the round, as all mingolf should, with ice cream that knocked it out of the park.

Tomorrow I am going to keep chugging away on the research, I’ll keep you all updated with my progress.

Best,

ETC

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