Day One:

I arrived at the Animal House Fund on the Hill for my first day on Thursday, May 8^th, my first day of summer after my last AP the day before.  Woohoo no more thinking/studying/academics until late August!  It’s really weird to think that the next class I will take will be in college and that I’m completely done with academics at Burroughs.  Anyways I came into the Animal House and was immediately put into a room to “socialize” with 11 cats, which was slightly nerve-wracking because the only cats I had ever interacted with in the past were Sarah and Haley’s two cats, and some of these cats were not very friendly.  I sometimes was a little startled/scared when they would hiss or swipe at me, but overall it was fun being with the cats!  Then I had to clean some of the cat rooms, which was pretty gross but except for scooping out the litter boxes it wasn’t too bad.  Then Tessa, Margaret (Kogos) and I cleaned crates for awhile until they left.  Then a woman came in and asked me if I wanted to play with kittens!  So her and I socialized a little 2 month old kitten in a room for about 45 minutes, it was adorable but had some kind of neurological problem where its head shakes and its back legs don’t work very well, so whenever it would try to run somewhere it would kind of slide and not be able to be in control of its limbs/where it was going.  But they said that there was a nurse who was looking at adopting him and who also said she was always attracted to adopting animals with some kind of disability, which is amazing and incredibly nice of her. 

Day Two:

The next day I came in and Margaret, Tessa, and I first cleaned some rooms for a little while, then we got to bathe some kittens!  They were about 5 or 6 weeks old I think, and they were absolutely adorable.  We had to bathe them and they had to be bottle fed when they first came in because they don’t have a mom.  They have a lot of motherless kittens in there for various reasons, sometimes the moms abandon their kittens, the moms die, or even people abandon kittens.  Apparently recently someone left a box of 35 kittens on the side of the highway and they distributed the kittens among the animal shelters in St. Louis, and the Animal House got 7 of those kittens but one of them already died L.  Kittens are really fragile and apparently die a lot, enough so that they don’t name the kittens until they’re between 10 and 12 weeks old because they don’t want people to get too attached to the kittens in case they end up dying.  But luckily the Animal House has a lower kitten mortality rate than anywhere else in St. Louis!  But anyways, Tessa, Margaret and I bathed the kittens in the sink, which they weren’t big fans of, they spent the whole time meowing angrily (but cutely!).  Afterwards we had to wrap them up in towels and cuddle them and rub them until they were completely dry so they wouldn’t get cold.  They are so cute and cuddly and energetic and just try to climb all over us while we’re drying them!  Then after that we socialized 3 4-month-old kittens in a room, they were all black but some had some white patches on different parts of their bodies and they were adorable and had so much energy! They ran and climbed all over/up the walls (we had to pull one off the ceiling) and they’re called the pasta kittens because they’re named Rigatoni, Rotini, and Rose Marie.  Then Tessa and Margaret left again around 1:30 and I spent some more time socializing more cats and doing various cleaning/feeding jobs that need doing around Animal House.  Keeping that place clean is a huge, never-ending, and really important job, because if the place isn’t clean it can lead to the cats getting sick, and with 200 cats and 70 kittens in one building, if one gets sick they all do!  It’s interesting seeing how sanitary all the rooms are and how strict they are with cleanliness, like each room has all of its own cleaning supplies, its own bucket of food, and you have to wash your hands before entering and after leaving every room.  You can’t bring anything into a room that’s from another room and that hasn’t been sanitized directly beforehand.  It’s a huge job to keep all of these animals safe and healthy.

First Day Shadowing:

On Monday, May 12^th, I shadowed a primary care physician at Boonslick Medical Group.  During the day, I went to all of his appointments with his patients and saw a huge amount of patient interaction.  I saw the doctor deal with a large amount of elderly patients with patience, kindness, and a level of familiarity and comfort that put the patients at ease and made them trust him.  Most of the patients were really nice and receptive to his care, but there were also a couple who were hard to deal with.  One had a lot of anxiety and stress about all of her health issues and seemed like she was causing a lot of her problems and self-diagnosing excessively, but he did his best to hear her concerns and not trivialize her worries.  It showed me that you can’t just dismiss people as a doctor because you think that they are making a big deal out of nothing, and keeping the patient comfortable and calm should be your top priority and you will be unable to treat them or allay their concerns if you dismiss them and put the person down.  He also had to deal with some rude patients, including a patient who was calling in repeatedly about a rash and threatening to call his superiors and wanting to be admitted to the hospital over a rash, which is excessive and it is very unlikely that they would ever admit a patient to the hospital over a rash.  But, he had them come in and was nice to them and never raised his voice and overall dealt with them maturely and calmly and was able to keep the situation from escalating.  Overall the day was a great experience, and even though I thought primary care would be somewhat boring I liked it a surprising amount, as it was nice to see the almost deductive skills necessary to find out what is wrong with someone and prescribe them whatever medicine will help whatever is ailing them.

Second Day Shadowing:

On Tuesday, May 13^th, I shadowed a gastroenterologist at Boonslick Medical Group/Barnes Jewish Hospital.  I started the day around 9 am and I spent the first part of the day at Boonslick shadowing consults that the doctor did with various patients.  He saw several people who had esophagitis (spelling?) where their esophagus was constricted which made it very difficult to eat and swallow food.  One woman he scheduled an appointment to stretch out her esophagus after other medication treatments failed, another woman was one whom he was seeing for the first time and he put on medicine to hopefully treat it, and the third was a man whom he had already stretched his esophagus before and he was going to restretch it because it constricted again.  This man was particularly frustrating because he was a smoker who expressed no desire to quit and who admitted he was not taking the medicine he was prescribed in the past, and he probably would not take it in the future because it was unlikely he would suddenly turn around his unhealthy lifestyle.  In this situation, the doctor could only tell the man to quit smoking and to take the medicine he was prescribed, but he could not force the man to do anything, which is extremely frustrating.  With this, I could see how helpless people in the medical profession often are, because even though they know how to help people they can’t force these people to help themselves.  Then, later in the afternoon, I saw several colonoscopies and endoscopies, which were really interesting.  Probably the best was the colonoscopy they performed on a middle-aged woman who had been having a variety of symptoms that all pointed strongly to late-stage colon cancer, but luckily just ended up being something treatable!  It was really happy to see the relief on all the doctor’s faces, especially after seeing the intense worry on the face of the woman before she was put under anesthesia.  After seeing the helplessness doctor’s can sometimes experience, it was nice to see something where the woman was able to get very lucky and evade cancer in a very unusual case.

Last Days at the Animal House:

For my last few days I did much of the same I did my first few days, luckily getting to bathe and play with a  lot of kittens!  But the high mortality of kittens was shown to me sadly, when Tessa, Margaret, and I noticed that 2 of 4 kittens we were bathing one day had infected eyes, then by the next day 1 of them had died and the other one was close to death.  I’m not sure how the others ended up because I didn’t want to ask L But I ended my time at the Animal House with the best job of cuddling two 4 week old kittens! I’m going to miss all the kittens and I hope I have time to go back this summer!