Settling Into the Swing of Things

Wow! I cannot believe October has come to an end. Time seems to be flying by so quick! I was extremely excited to start the month with our cardiology block. Having always been interested in the inner workings of the heart, I truly enjoyed taking my interest to the next level. My favorite part was learning how to read EKGs and associating a particular reading with a cardiac pathology. However, it was also very educational to learn about common diseases such as Hypertension and Heart Failure that clearly plague our society and the drugs that are available to treat them.

On the volunteer front, I have continued to volunteer with St. Anna's both on the medical unit and assisting with the nutrition class. On the medical unit, I am enjoying being able to educate adults on the importance of healthy life style choices and the seriousness of hypertension and high blood glucose levels. I am really enjoying myself in the nutrition call as well and have found that the service has been extremely rewarding and satisfying knowing that we are making a difference in these children’s lives that could last them a lifetime. This month we taught the girls how to make mexican pizzas and pinwheels with pears and cheese. It has been really frustrating to me that while the girls know if something is healthy or not, they don't really understand why something is healthy. I hope that in the next month, Aubrey and I can come up with some educational diagrams to help them understand something as simple as why fiber is healthy and how it works on the digestive system.

I have also been working at Edible School Yard teaching children who are taking cooking as an elective. This was a little different from St. Anna’s Art for Kids in that it focused mostly on passing on both recipes and techniques that they could use in the future for their own use or in a restaurant setting. It is truly amazing how great these kids are at cooking and it inspires me to want to learn. Throughout my life, I have never really learned how to cook but I hope to change that this year. A lot of the recipes are new to me and I have been learning a ton. My favorite so far was learning how to make pasta! It is really great to see these girls striving for a future and I am glad to be able to help them.

I didn't have much time to volunteer at Touro this month. My experience here has been a little disappointing. I was hoping to learn more about the medical field, in particular emergency medicine, through this experience, so I hope next month I can accomplish that. However, I did have one exciting experience. Classmate Andrew and I learned how to read a chest X-ray. It was really interesting to see how simple and quick doctors take to analyze them. ABCDE - Airway, Bone, Cardiac, Diaphragm and Everything else. That is something that will stick with me!

Hours:
ESY: 3 hours
SAAK: 2 hours
SAAM: 3.5 hours
Touro: 3 hours
Total October: 11.5 hours


Total: 46 hours