This week was our first week of work, and it was great! While it is always going to take a bit to get used to a new place, we are starting to settle in. Although our mentor was out of town this week, I was lucky enough to observe various clinical visits with Dr. Pacheco and Dr. Saborio at Hospital Nacional de Niños. They were very helpful, explaining any questions I had and helping me with my Spanish. The hardest part was that everything was in Spanish and I tried to keep it that way to increase my level of fluency! I have started to pick up on both medical and non-medical phrases that they use, and I am able to converse when they are talking to me and I am able to understand everything in patient consults, but it is still hard to pick up on casual conversations that they have with each other. It is a work in progress!
Before the internship start, we also participated in the Biodesign Bootcamp at UCR, in which I worked with a Junior mechanical engineering student from UCR and two Bioengineering students (one a senior and the other a sophomore) from TEC. After getting second in the marshmallow challenge (which we should have won but that’s another story), I pitched a project on rotatable beds and was able to use my Spanish (with the help of Kathy) to explain the project to those who were curious.
Our marshmallow challenge tower that should have won!
I was placed on my first selected project whose problem statement was to find a better way to support cerebral palsy (CP) patients in walking throughout childhood because current ankle foot orthoses must be changed as a child grow. Working with a team from Costa Rica was a great experience to teach me how to work not only in a time crunch, but also in a mix of English and Spanish with cultural differences. This was less stressful of an experience than I was expecting, and it great to work with my team!
The AFO device our team created at a low fidelity during the Biodesign bootcamp.
The need for the project that I worked on further demonstrated itself during my first week as an intern, where CP patients came to the clinic to get their ankle-foot angles measured and get new ankle foot orthoses (AFOs). Observing in the clinic was interesting because they had different times in the week for different patients populations. This allowed me read into the different conditions before consults to make observation more useful. I observed clinical visits with CP patients, burn patients, spina bifida patients, and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy patients. I look forward to working with my mentor in the coming weeks to discuss the needs identified in these clinical visits.
First day of “school” (the internship) with Sid.
Although my right IT bad has continued to feel better with proper rehab, my left IT band has started to flare up. I have been very concerned about it especially since I don’t have the same access to rehabilitation modalities in Costa Rica or as at Rice. I was still lucky enough to see some beautiful sights during the runs before I got hurt including Parque de la Paz and UCR, but now I am laser focused on recovery to run as soon as possible again. Luckily the gym membership has been helpful!
View of San José from the gym 🤩
2 different parts of Parque de la Paz. The park was beautiful.
I was finally able to pet Selina’s resident cat, Pascal, with some bribery 🙂