Week 4 - Jawad

This week I continued on with shadowing Dr. Gauthier in her clinical rounds. This time around though, I observed residents attending the patients and then briefing Dr. Gauthier about the patients. It was interesting to observe the 'protege-guru' kind of a relationship, with the residents doing a fairly good job of attending to patients, obtaining the required information and then suggesting to Dr. Gauthier about the treatment plans. Most of the times, their suggestions were acceptable without any major alterations to Dr. Gauthier.

Although I've been observing this for several weeks now, but this time around the emotional aspect of dealing with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) was more and more apparent. I could also appreciate the importance and relevance of the support structure, or lack thereof, afforded by the society to the MS patients. While most of the patients have friends and family to lean on for support, and it certainly gives them the will-power to continue on with their lives and be (economically) productive and functional for the most part. I witnessed that in the lack of such support system, a patient can experience simply a total emotional break down and become reclusive, when in fact they are in much better shape than some of the other patients who still work full-time and go hiking and trekking! "I could detect the screams in the smiles" was a remark made by a resident toward one such patient, who unfortunately had no family and friends to make her feel warm, and take care of her.

Other than the clinics, I've been working on the project. The automation of code to process the T2-Spiral images is now complete. And now it's just a matter of collecting all the patient's dicom images in one folder and passing the path of that folder as a parameter and pressing enter. The results will take a while (4 hours per patient) to compile, but no user intervention is required so one can attend to other tasks. Hopefully some nice results will be obtained!