Week 1 - The New Upper East Siders ..... Poornima

Its been an amazing first week of THE summer immersion. We reached Olin Hall, NYC around 10pm on Saturday night. Managed to find our rooms and doze off after some long tiring weeks in Ithaca. The mission for Sunday was - discover NYC!.

As the sun rose on Monday- The Day 1 - we all dressed up in formals stepped out with confidence and excitement. We met Dr.Wang and Mitch Cooper and

My mentor in this summer adventure is Dr. Theodore H. Schwartz, MD from the Neurosurgery Department. Dr. Schwartz speciality includes epilepsy, brain and pituitary tumors using endoscopy and microsurgery techniques. He is ranked amongst America’s top surgeons.

As Dr. Schwartz decided to meet me on Wednesday, I spent time in the library and poured over all the literature his lab instructors (Dr. Mingrui and Dr. Hongtao) sent me. I went form reading up the definition of epilepsy to its nonsurgical methods and the latest research findings in this field. It was interesting to learn how tetanus toxin is used to cause epileptic seizures in mice which are similar to the ones found in humans. And I also learnt about their research on using electrodes and optodes in chronic mice models of epilepsy. On Tuesday I had a brief tour of the lab led by Dr.Mingrui. As Wednesday came , I got the opportunity to finally meet my mentor and got a feel of working in his research lab. We discussed possible projects that I could work over the summer. Hopefully, my fingers crossed, very soon my summer project would materialize.

Although most of my batch mates got to experience the hospital environment on day 1 itself, I got to do it on Friday. It was fascinating! I got the chance to follow Dr. Schwartz on his clinical day. I observed him meeting with patients suffering from conditions as varied as pituitary tumor, epilepsy, meningioma, prolactinoma and acromegaly. For sure, by the end of the day, I was thrilled to see my medical knowledge hike up quite a bit. Although it was sad watching these patients come to terms with their diseases, I was amazed at the strength and understanding they exhibited. What striked me as the most distinct factor in this experience was the way they medical world functioned. Well, I think I might take some more weeks to elaborate on that.

For now,to sum up, this was a week of observation and realization of a brand new world that has been oblivious to me until now. Thus my mantra for days to come would be, to quote Theodore Roosevelt, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are”.