Alex Hauschild - Week 2 – Shields Ocular Oncology Rotation at Wills Eye Hospital

Over the past two weeks, I have been waking up at the crack of dawn to walk four blocks up 9^th street and get to the fourteenth floor of the hospital for clinic and/or time in the OR. Their clinic takes up an entire floor of the hospital and has 17 regular exam rooms, a photography room, an ultrasound room,  multiple vision lanes... etc, basically they have a room for every exam you could possibly think of. Doctors Carol and Jerry Shields (the co-directors of the Ocular Oncology Service) are the only ones in the hospital to have an entourage following them everywhere. The entourage currently consists of 14 med students and myself soon to grow to 18 total (excluding visiting doctors, fellows, residents, and normal clinic staff). Mondays and Tuesdays are clinic days; Wednesdays are for EUAs (evaluations under anesthesia); Thursdays are for surgeries; and Fridays are research days. The doctors don’t want more than 6 students in clinic at a time (3 with Dr. Jerry and 3 with Dr. Carol) and there can only be 3 students in any given OR, so there are always times when we are sitting around not in clinic or OR. What we do in this time is research that currently consists of pulling charts and entering data into a huge spreadsheet that is compiling data for the Shields next big publication. For legal reasons, I am not allowed to say much about the research since it involves people and since the paper has not been published yet. What I can say is that all the students that have worked on this project will get their name on the paper when it gets published, which means that I will have my name on it as well!!

                Other than the fact that we need to stand for about five hours on end without even leaning on a wall (or else risk getting a death stare from the doctors), clinic and OR can be very interesting and fun. Since I first stepped foot into the hospital, I have learned how various surgeries are performed, learned countless medical terms, learned to read charts; to use a slit lamp; an indirect; an iPhone in lieu of an indirect; to perfectly time the turning of the lights on and off, and how to properly hand the doctors their colored pencils to draw a diagram of the cancer (because god forbid you hand the pencil to the doctors the wrong way). Something I have picked up on is the unwritten rule of pencils, which dictates simply that the more pencils you carry around with you, the more important you are (the minimum amount of pencils is 10 and it only goes up from there).

OR can be very interesting. One patient decided to start singing for us in the middle of their surgery. One thing that I realize with surgeries is that if a patient wakes up in the middle of it and gets told not to do something, it is exactly that something that they will do. The surgeons could be in the middle of a patient’s eye, the patient wakes up, gets told not to move, guess what the first thing they do is? – That’s right start thrashing in a panic. Cases like this will be put under general anesthesia for the remainder of the surgery. This past week I saw one of the saddest things ever: a double enucleation. (For those that don’t know, an enucleation is the surgical removal of the eye.) He did not deserve to have this happen to him; he was one of the nicest persons that I have ever met. In the post-surgical consultation, I was tearing up at the things being said about him. It was so sad and yet so inspiring. I will never forget this patient.

Outside of work I live on the corner of 9^th and South across from the Whole Foods, which is very convenient for when I need to go grocery shopping. I run every other day on the Schuylkill (because most days I will come back home with my back and legs being sore from standing all day long). I have taken a few trips to Franklin Field (big name in track) and quite a few trips up the Rocky Steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum. I stay with a family, they have a little 5 year old named Liam, and he’s really cute.  All in all I have already learned so much with my work but I haven’t even begun to scrape the surface. I look forward to the many weeks to come!