Hi all! I’m excited to give you my halfway-through-the-summer update this week. (Excuse me? Halfway through the summer already?) As we head into the second half of our internships, I’m excited to focus more on some prototype ideas that Pablo and I have.
Unfortunately, I don’t have much to share about the first half of the week, since I was sick with some sort of stomach issue. I woke up Sunday morning with stomach pain, and while I did have about half of a coconut smoothie for breakfast, I wasn’t able to do much or eat much for the rest of the day. I had to miss out on our group dinner that night, although I did feel well enough to sit in the kitchen and attempt to help Hannah and Emily salvage their roasted red pepper sauce. (See Hannah and Emily’s posts for more information about that culinary experiment.) I went to bed early that night and unfortunately did not sleep very well. On Monday and Tuesday I stayed home from work since I still wasn’t feeling well and wasn’t eating and sleeping consistently. Luckily, the waitress at the restaurant here in Selina was really sweet. I mentioned my upset stomach and she brought me some ginger tea, some juice, and a bowl of banana slices.
Breakfast of champions
During my downtime, I made a lot of progress on the book I’m reading (Circe by Madeline Miller) and finalized my housing arrangements for the fall semester.
By Wednesday, I was feeling well enough to go back to HNN. Our main patient-facing highlight was seeing an EEG procedure done. The patient was a two-month-old baby, and her head was juuuust big enough for the standard electrode configuration that most tests use. If she had been any smaller, the technician would have used a modified configuration that uses half the amount of electrodes. The technician brushed the patient’s scalp with an exfoliating gel, then stuck the electrodes to her head with a thick conductive cream. The patient was sleeping, so we didn’t see any movement artifacts that you typically see with patients who are awake. We also continued shadowing Dr. Bogantes during his rounds through the hospital.
In the afternoons, Pablo and I have been narrowing down the ideas we have for our prototyping project. One of our top choices is to modify the Doppler ultrasound headset we saw last week to make it more comfortable for the patient, and easier to set the transducers in the right position. Our design mentor David will be helping us to 3D print some new structures.
Costa Rica’s next top model?
Talk to you next week!