Defining Moments: Thoughts of a Catholic EM Wannabe: Working with kids

A few things for today:

First, please continue to keep my friend and her family in your prayers.

Second, I wanted to say a few words about the tenth and eleventh graders that I worked with this past Wednesday. I have to say, it sounded like a pretty tough schedule. Many of them were coming from an hour or two away and so were only getting four or five hours of sleep. Needless to say, these teenagers weren't too excited about having what amounted to a series of 20-minute lectures first thing in the morning. I was assigned, along with one of my fellow MS-2's, to present a synopsis of the neurological exam. Fair enough, we figured, we'd do brief presentations on cranial nerves, cerebellar testing, and then demonstrate reflexes and let them practice on each other. Well, never having done it before, the first group was a pretty fair disaster. I'm pretty sure at least two of the kids fell asleep. So we picked it up for the second group, had plenty of time to do our "fun" activity (reflex testing)...and found out that they had already learned how to do this the previous day. Oops. Sooo, we started improvising. We starting doing things like demonstrating Weber and Rinne testing, pupillary reflexes, and the Babinski sign. (After much debate, we decided to skip actually showing them how to test a gag reflex...) It ended up going ok, although it was pretty evident the kids had had about enough after three or four stations (I think there were seven total).

The afternoon got everyone much more engaged. They were presented with a public health crisis - they had to come up with a plan for dealing with an H1N1 / H5N1 flu outbreak in Pittsburgh. The discussion was very spirited and HIGHLY entertaining. As the scenario got more complicated (oh, it seems that the disease has spread to DC) and the kids had more and more to deal with, they became more and more desperate...and increasingly hilarious. I didn't know whether to be amused or disturbed by the frequent references to "I Am Legend" and when we suggested that there were really no wrong answers, we had to retract almost immediately thanks to a "cut your losses...nuke the city" suggestion. In the end, the kids decided to quarantine a radius of 40 miles around the city, make all the citizens remain in their houses under guard (military and police who would be supplied with protective gear), to set up triage stations at Mellon Arena, and to supply the city by airdrop (all supplies would be dropped into Heinz Field). We tried to indicate that this would require far more in the way of manpower, money, and supplies than we would have available, but to no avail. Still, it was certainly not a terrible plan and it was very interesting to see how they prioritized -- they emphasized the good of the community over individual freedom and suggested eminently pragmatic and unsentimental measures. There was even some suggestion that the media should be asked to lie to prevent panic, although this was eventually voted down on the theory that offering misinformation would cause greater panic than truth ever could. The group dynamic was also interesting -- one girl established herself as the clear leader, while the others each had at least one substantive commentary on some issue about which they felt strongly. It was fascinating and truly entertaining, although I almost died when they presented the "nuclear option" and the "day of the dead" option (kill all of the infected) before getting to their actual proposal in the big group setting. I'm kind of shocked that Dr. Gonzalez didn't ban us from all future related events...

Anyhow, that was a truly fun and rewarding experience. I don't know if I'll get any photos from that event, but if I do, I'll post them here.

Third, I do have some pictures from the Health Scholar's Academy that I and a handful of other PittMed students helped out with last week, so I figured I'd post those.