On 6/1, I drove all the way to Lillington but it was worth it. I got to shadow Dr. Lewis who is a cardiologist. I followed her in the clinic and met many people, who were mostly very old. I met an 86-year-old man! The patients mostly lived in the country, so many of them suffered from old tobacco farm smoking or secondhand smoke. It was cool to see how history can impact people’s lives and health today. The most exciting part of my day was seeing how a nurse practitioner and another nurse run a stress test on a patient in real-time. The patient had to walk on the treadmill as fast as she could with monitors on her chest. She was experiencing chest pain, so that’s why the doctor ordered her to take a stress test. Immediately after she couldn’t walk on the treadmill anymore, she went over to the chair and the nurse did an ultrasound on her heart. The nurse looked at all different angles and from the final ultrasound pictures, she could look at her heart function before and after exerting herself. She explained to me the anatomy shown at different angles and what they were looking for in a healthy heart. The patient luckily had healthy heart function!
After all the appointments were over, Dr. Lewis explained to me how she reads cardiograms. Earlier, I had listened to a lady’s heart that had every other beat too early. She showed me how that is represented in a cardiogram. Below is an example of what that can look like (the arrow points to the early beat).
