Today, since Dr. Hsu had to work in the clinic with patients, I did research about what Dr. Hsu actually does on a daily basis. Dr. Hsu pursued an MD PhD so that he could practice medicine with cancer patients while still conducting research in a lab. He explained that 70% of the time he conducts research, writes thesis papers, collaborates with other oncologists while he spends the other 30% of his time working at the Duke Medical Center with cancer patients suffering from gastrointestinal cancers. Most of his clinical work deals with patients with colorectal cancer, and most of his research is conducted on mice where he explores genomics and computational biology. His lab focuses on the use of genomic based technologies to identity and develop novel therapeutic targets for the treatment of gastrointestinal cancers. His lab also develops preclinical models using patient derived xenographs and early passage cell lines in GI cancers. Dr. Hsu has in fact developed this technique further so that it has been used to treat lung, breast, renal, bladder, melanoma, sarcoma, and other cancers. His primary focus however, is on colorectal cancers. He has done a lot of work with drug effects on cancer cell lines exploring the most potent drugs to combat the growth of these cell lines, and the way that he does this is by observing and analyzing cancer growth in mice. And though most of his work consists of working hands on with mice and live cancer cells from the OR, he spends some of his time conducting data analysis to evaluate the potency of certain drugs on different types of cancers.
Tag: #1
Day One- Babies Galore
Today I began my work experience at Carolina Kids Pediatrics. The day started at 8:30 AM when I arrived at the office. Dr. Emmet introduced me to the nurses and a few of the other doctors, and she also took me through the office to look at the conference room where we eat lunch and where I can put my lunch beforehand. The office features a carefully designed layout where patients naturally walk through a hallway that leads them to a curved room with the 15 doors leading to various exam rooms and bathrooms. A large, semi-circular desk stands in the middle of the curved room. The area consists of desks for each nurse and doctor, an island to prepare vaccines, and a fridge that holds the vaccines. The layout of the office proved conducive to effective work.
Throughout the day, I saw patients from all walks of life. I think it’s safe to say that pediatricians take care of children from their time in the womb until they are 21 years of age. I learned that due to the wide array of patients, pediatricians need to know a lot about kids! It seems obvious, but the most important information I took from today was that knowledge of children includes not only medical information, but also behavioral and emotional tendencies. Spending time with an 18-month-old boy makes for a completely different visit than one with an eight-year-old girl. Also, a pediatrician tailors the visit to the number of family members in the exam room and the child’s typical behaviors. For the rambunctious, four child check-up group, Dr. Willey moves right into physical examinations. After examining one child, she talks with the general group of kids for a few moments before moving on to the next patient. Throughout the visit, however, she will converse with the child about their life at home while fielding questions from parents. Then, once the patients are all checked out, she will sit down and speak with the parent. However, for the visits with younger, shyer kids, Dr. Willey will begin in a seated position while she speaks to the parents and the patient about life at home, their eating habits, their favorite activities, recent illnesses, and, everyone’s favorite, their bowel movements. After connecting with her patients for a few minutes, Dr. Willey will perform her examination. The visit usually lasts about 20 minutes, seeing as Dr. Willey likes to converse with her patients and spend time getting to know them. I learned throughout the day that she connects with her patients while working efficiently, ensuring that she maximizes her time with each patient. She exercises immense care and empathy with each patient, making it obvious why so many families in the area choose to see her.
Overall, we saw a lot of younger children today. Some frequent conversations included rashes, (most commonly the hand, foot, and mouth virus), car-seats, persistent coughs, fevers, and again, bowel movements. Dr. Willey also painted some fluoride onto the teeth of younger patients since children don’t see their dentist until they are two or three years old. On the whole, today was the best first day I could’ve had. I learned numerous fun facts about kids and got to witness a wonderful doctor at work. I can’t wait for the next few days with Dr. Willey!
Fun Facts:
- You can lose a nail without it every growing back. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, seeing as many people have survived without a nail on their nailbed!
- Your red blood cell count is typically higher than your white blood cell count.
- Pink eye drainage consists of white blood cells, bacteria, and “sleep”
- An adult takes an average of 18 breaths per minute while newborns can take more than 40 breaths per minute.
- The inside of an infected ear appears peach colored with puss.
- Two week old babies sometimes sleep with their eyes open.
Day 1 – Lots and Lots and Lots of Statistics
First day in the books! After struggling with parking for well beyond the 10 min we had given ourselves as a buffer, Suki and I arrived at the 5th floor of NCSU’s Statistics Department. We met with Dr. Eric Laber, a statistics professor who is involved in so many interesting endeavors on and off campus. He led us to a conference room where he gave a presentation on what we’d be doing for the next couple weeks and the vast amounts of applications for statistics, specifically adaptive algorithms (computer programs that learn from each previous run/action and can compile that data and be able to decide more optimal actions), with projects such as chess-playing robots whose code could be cross-applied to identifying individuals involved human trafficking, fighting the AIDS/HIV and Ebola crises through precision medicine (providing the right treatment at the right time to the right patient at the right dose to maximize resource potential), and so many other crazy complicated schemes that I couldn’t wrap my head around. It wasn’t even midday and I was already mentally exhausted. He gave us a tour of campus before taking us to BOM (Bureau of Mines) where his research facility, Laber Labs, works out of. There we met Alison Wu, a graduate student from China who will be working at Apple starting September. We helped her manually program Nona, the chess-playing robot we’d heard so much about, by replicating the actions given by a program on a physical chess set to 100 actions and taking pictures of each specific move. She explained this would help Nona compile a library of images to develop a clearer grasp of each chess piece, rather than just working with online 3D models. In total, Suki and I completed almost 800 actions – phew. While tedious, we understood how important the work was- plus, we were rewarded with ice cream from NCSU’s famous Howling Cow! I’m excited to learn more about the rest of the team which consists of people from statistics to industrial design majors and helping them out with their respective projects. On to the next day…
