My first week of immersion in one word: implausible. Before this week, it was implausible to me that standing for 8 straight hours would leave me exhausted. It was implausible to me that I would take comfort in living in a student dorm again.
But there were also good things about having an implausible week. I saw the cerebellum of a nine-year old girl after the surgeon removed bone and replaced it with a biomaterial to relieve compression issues. I saw an endoscopy where a drill was inserted inside the brain of a four month-old to place a hole in growing film that prevented fluid cerebral spinal fluid from flowing. All of these feats were implausible to me before now.
One of the purposes of this immersion experience is to understand how doctors treat patients and how technology can be used or created to inform that treatment. As I go about the next six weeks, I will keep this idea central to my thoughts. I am being trained as a bioengineer, as I see it, to be able to merge technological innovation with biological questions. So that one day in whatever role I will be in, I can make devices or develop techniques that will make someone else’s seemingly implausible experience a reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment