first week

The last couple days have been great. I’m starting to get to know the other people on the team that’s working on this study, and hearing a lot about ways to get into medical research. It’s a really nice group that happens to be almost all women, so there’s a great kind of girl-power atmosphere. I’ve been eating lunch in the cafeteria of the Biomedical Research Building, which is where all the medical students eat, so I hear horror stories about the practical exams they have to go through. It’s not really making me want to become a doctor (I’m probably too squeamish anyway) but my conversations with the various researchers have made me think that scientific research might be a really cool job. Everyone here is so passionate about their work. My sponsor’s husband, who’s a neurosurgeon at UH, told me yesterday about an experiment he’s doing which involves putting human brain tumors into mice to test new therapies. Which sucks for the mice, but is a super cool idea when you think about it.

I’ve been learning a ton about brain tumors just by looking through the data and medical records, like which kinds are more life-threatening, the kinds of surgeries and chemotherapy people undergo, the weird symptoms, etc. Yesterday I went through over 100 files sorting out family histories. The hard-copy charts are really detailed, so I was transferring the important stuff to MS Excel so it could be analyzed. On the way I got to read all about people’s families and their job history. There were so many different types of people, from college students to miners to nail technicians to pediatricians. There was one person who had both grandfathers die in separate railroad accidents, for instance, and one who has a half-sister in Italy he’d never met. It’s like getting tiny glimpses into all these different peoples’ lives… I have like a million ideas for characters in novels inspired by these files already. I still haven’t gotten to perform an interview by myself, but next week I will get to do that and travel to different hospitals in the morning with the nurse on the team to get consent from newly diagnosed patients to participate in the study. I’ll also get to do some calculations/data analysis of all the stuff I sorted through this week, and see if we get any results that show a pattern of inheritance.