I have to say that my favorite hospital has to be Children's Hospital. Maybe I am biased, because I absolutely love children, but every experience I have had there has been extremely rewarding. In Neurology and Epilepsy I got the chance to entertain children while they waited in a tiny cramped room while their sibling was being attended, and I got to smile at little babies who weren't even aware that they were at risk of having seizures.
I learned that based on brain activity, the doctor can tell whether someone is at risk of having seizures. They can also look at brain x-rays and depending on the color of the tissue they can tell whether there are abnormalities that may contribute to the patient's health. Based on the "spikes" in the brain activity levels, patients received certain doses of medicine to bring the levels back to normal and reduce or eliminate their chances of seizures. After the levels get back to normal, which may take years, then the patient is slowly weaned off the medicine and will most likely be "cured".
Later that same week, I was at Children's Hospital again, but this time in the Occupational and Physical Therapy department. This time, I was following the doctor who was working with inpatients, or patients that had been staying in the hospital for a period of time after a surgery. I was able to meet a young boy from Chile, who had a surgery to biopsy a part of his brain that was lesioned. Unfortunately, he had a brain hemorrhage and lost a lot of blood after the surgery. Because he was in bed for so long and the surgery involved removing a part of his brain, his muscles, his brain, and his eyes, were not functioning together and needed to be trained to return back to normal activity. This was done through lots of rest, walking around the hospital, pushing elevator buttons, reading signs around the hospital and playing basketball.
I also had the pleasure to meet a young girl who had had a heart transplant. She was being monitored to make sure her heart was assimilating to her body and functioning properly. What she was working on with the Physical Therapist was everyday functions like brushing teeth, brushing hair, and taking showers. This she did very well. I got to sit in and watch her heart ultrasound, or echo cardiogram, which showed the pressure of the blood in the heart to make sure blood was not being backed up in the heart and creating pressure.
Both these patients had such positive attitudes, that one forgot that they had suffered from such serious complications. This was possibly the most rewarding part: seeing such innocent people benefiting so greatly from such subtle activities. I think this is the best part of medicine, being able to make a difference in a person's life, especially one who's life is barely beginning.
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