Skip to main content

Hospital Week 1

Our first rotation in the Hospital Clínico Universitario Lozano Blesa started Monday morning at 9:00.  There are 12 of us in the international healthcare internship program. We were each assigned to a different department in the hospital.
I was assigned to the digestive department. I observed doctors and residents for approximately 20 hours this week, averaging a schedule of 9:00 - 14:00. I started out each morning with Enrique and Pablo. They are both in the last week of their residency, culminating an 10 year education path. (6 years of school, no undergrad) and a 4 year residency. We started off each morning with a meeting in which we went over the new patients and ongoing updates of current patients. We passed by to visit each one, usually around 15 patients. There were patients with a wide variety of digestive issues ranging from excessive diarrhea to internal bleeding to cancer. One morning we had a patient that was completely out of control attacking and screaming at everyone because he wanted to get out of his bed but he wouldn't listen to the fact that he had internal hemorrhage and needed to stay in bed. Eventually they had to give him medicine to make him sleep so that he would stop injuring himself and others. Overall, I had a lot of neat experiences with the personal contact with patients (most were amazed that I could speak Spanish, and that I had taken courses on Spanish medical terminology). After visiting all the patients, we would formulate brief treatment plans for each, and then the residents would begin their charts, and they would take me to another section of the department so that I could see more procedures and observe other aspects of the digestive system. I was able to observe the following processes in the department of endocscopies: gastroscopy, rectoscopy, and colonoscopy. I also learned about cancer development and the identification of cancerous polyps in the digestive tract. I witnessed many surgical procedures where adenoma polyps were extirpated, including one procedure were an extremely large polyp was removed. Another day I spent in the digestive laboratory where the doctor was testing esophagus mobility and pressure through esophageal manometry after a gastroscopy did not reveal any information about the cause of a certain illness.

Overall, I had a great experience in the digestive department but I am definitely ready to move on to traumatology next week!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Utah - Barcelona - Zaragoza

We left the SLC airport at 9:30 am on the 30th of April. We flew straight to LAX and then randomly back to Denver before catching another plane to London. After a brief layover we caught one final plane to Barcelona. My wife Summer and I checked into our hotel and crashed for the night. (my head doesn't do very well on airplanes, so I felt extremely jet lagged). The next morning we went to Sharma Climbing BCN, a rock climbing gym founded by one of my favorite rock climbers, Chris Sharma. We then visited the Gothic Barrio and wandered around the narrow streets. We saw the Barcelona Cathedral and many other sites.  We walked down to the beach and onto a pier where we sat and stared at the ocean and walked along the beach up to our ankles in the water.  We then got back on the metro and headed to our reservation at La Sagrada Familia. After a busy day we went back and crashed at the hotel. The next day, we were planning on hiking up to the monastery o...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Day in the Life of a Global Health Intern in Spain (required post)

A day in the Life First we wake up around 6:30 am and get dressed and ready for the day. At 7:00 am we go down for breakfast. A typical breakfast here consists of a bocadillo which is basically just a ham and cheese sandwich on crunchy bread with some pineapple juice and fruit. At 7:20 am Summer goes back up to the room to work on her classes, and I head to the hospital. It takes about 30 minutes to get there. I first catch the metro to a certain plaza and then catch a bus a few blocks away that will drop me at the front door of the hospital. I go up to the 2nd floor to the Traumatology department. The first hour is usually a meeting with all the doctors and residents in the department where we would go over new patients and go over previous cases and surgeries. Then around 9:00 am everyone would split and go to their different places. I would go down with one of the residents to the operating room where we would stay until around 2:00 depending on the surgerie...
Post a Comment
Read more

You are the Gift (required post)

This post is in reference to the speech titled Turning Enemies into Friends by Sister Eubank given at a devotional at BYU. One section of this speech is called "You are the Gift" in which she explains that humanitarian work can apply in the fact that each specific person can be a gift through giving of oneself. She says, " What would it look like if each of us were our own well-stocked humanitarian organization? Instead of just giving out tangible goods in foreign locations, what if we had the richness of dispensing healing, friendship, respect, peaceful dialogue, sincere interest, protective listening of children, birthday remembrances, and conversations with strangers? What if that was what your humanitarian organization did? This kind of humanitarian work can be done by anybody and it can be done at any time." There are several key phrases that stood out to me in this quote, that I have pondered on, and decided to make an extra effort to put into pra...
Post a Comment
Read more