My Internship

Hi all!

It's been such a busy week! On Monday, it was the first day of my paid six week long internship at the university hospital and since then there's been no rest whatsoever. I'm at the hospital for my placement for five days a week, Mondays to Fridays for 8 hours, so that's either a 9am-5pm or an 8am-4pm shift. On top of Monday's, I'm also volunteering within the same grounds on the gastrointestinal ward from 5pm-7pm. On the weekends, I've also got two 4 hour shifts on my part-time job and two hours volunteering at the children's hospital. So I'm midway through a 50-hour week and so far - I think I'm doing alright. My only concern is preparing for my UKCAT and personal statement alongside all of this.

Today was my third day into my internship and I'm beginning to really enjoy it! I'm working alongside two really lovely medical students who'll be entering their fourth year this September and they've both been incredibly helpful settling me in. My internship over the six weeks is primarily administrative, focusing on data entry of patient records which are collated into one large database which is being used for auditing as well as for their research projects over the summer. Over the past few days it's been fascinating to get to know what sort of research they're carrying out with this data and I've understood that the role that I'm currently doing was something one of the medical students was doing over the last summer, except this year she's manipulating and making use of both my data and her data, so she happily showed me the ropes and helped me understand the medical background behind my data and getting familiar with all the terms. 

The consultant overseeing my work is an Upper GI surgeon and so that's essentially the clinical nature of the data I'm working on. Its patients who've primary suffered from adenocarcinomas in their gastrointestinal and oesophogeal tracts and so the subsequent treatments they've had to treat it are gastroenectomies and oesophegectomies. Its these surgical procedures and the histopathology data related to it that I've had to handle and it's been a steep learning curve to handle. Prior to this, I hadn't really appreciated or grasped what a surgical resection entailed, and if I had, I probably didn't give it much thought. 

I didn't really know the anatomy of the stomach, but now I'm confident I could label the cardia, fundus, phylorus, duodenum, body, the lesser and greater curves, and the distal and proximal margins  - all of which are features of this incredible organ. I definitely hadn't heard of the TNM classification for tumours, let alone how to convert one staging from the old UICC 6 framework to the newly introduced UICC 7 method, but now I do! I still have quite a lot to learn when it comes to this pathology data, such as getting familiar with Lauren types (such as intestinal, diffuse or mixed..) and the Macroscopic appearance of tumours (such as ulcerated, polyploid, ill-defined..), on top of R0, R1a, R1b, and R2 resections. It's one thing to simply copy across these terms, because let's be fair - that's the minimum that's expected of me, but with an amazing opportunity like this where I can grasp and flavour clinical knowledge, it would be a shame not to identify and understand what I could potentially be looking out for in the future. 

What struck me the most was when the medical student who'd done this last year - told me she had to do all of this completely on her own - self taught. Her medical school knowledge briefly glanced over TNM staging, and in the majority of cases she had to go away and research how to apply and assign these terms, which was impressive! Can you tell I've been picking her brain a little with all my questions? She's been so incredibly helpful and I am eternally grateful!

Anyway, I'll try and write again soon - but for now I'll be going to sleep and getting some rest for tomorrow! Thanks for reading. P.S. Good luck with everyone receiving their GCSE results tomorrow!