Orientation 2

Today, as part of orientation, we drove around Dixon and the surrounding areas to get a better idea of the area. We were fortunate enough to have two members of our team who have lived around here for quite a while and so they were able to take us around Dixon and Oregon (home of the Liberty statue, the second largest monolithic concrete statue in the world). Since one of our teammates is from Oregon, she was able to fill us in on all the different things that go during the summer, including a one day festival where artists come in and turn corn fields into works of art (think Signs!) that can be viewed by helicopter. Other potential activities included visiting a dude ranch, an organic farm, or a swine slaughterhouse (okay, so that last one doesn't sound nearly as appealing).

As for the program itself, it looks like we'll be spending time with preceptors in different health care professions (public health, hospice care, social work, pharmacy, nursing, physical therapy, and additional time for our own designation), with an emphasis on our own area. The medicine rotation takes place at a primary care clinic in Oregon, IL with a couple of physicians who also help out with the Rockford campus (I'm going to be in Peoria). We will also be working on a community service project that involves figuring out how to disseminate information from a health services directory compiled by last year's interns, and we'll be helping out at a health camp for high school students at NIU for a weekend sometime in June.

The directors also took us out for dinner at a local steakhouse, and we were able to hear a lot of their stories. One of them is an allergist in Rockford who works as faculty in the medical school there and the other works with Hispanic/other underserved populations in addressing health care disparities. As I sat at dinner (I had a rack of lamb) listening to the conversation, I couldn't help but wonder how different my summer would have been had my initial plans had stuck. The fact that I initially turned down this internship only to come back a month later and find that my spot was still open still makes me wonder, and after today, I am even more excited for what these next few weeks will bring.

Having said all this, I'm looking foward to going home this weekend to celebrate a few birthdays.

Orientation

I arrived in Dixon, IL for orientation for my summer program. After sitting through about two hours of hospital orientation videos (although they did provide chocolate chip cookies during the showing), we were given a brief tour of the hospital. The hospital is a 90 bed facility that seems to do pretty well for itself, about 5,000,000 in revenue a year, It looks like they will have us working on some community service project (details to be discussed in the next couple days) while rotating through different departments, including Medicine, Social Work, Physical Therapy, Pharmacy, and Public Health. So while I probably won't be getting the hands-on clinical experience one might hope for, I hope to get a pretty good idea of different departments and how they function within the scope of patient care.

My fellow interns include a couple of nursing students, a undergraduate biology major, and a recent Masters of Social Work graduate. A couple of them are locals to the area and all of us, at this point, don't really know what to expect.

The hospital itself sits on the Rock River. The tourist attractions that I've come across so far include Ronald Reagan's home, the yearly Petunia Festival (can it get any more rural sounding that that?), and that arch you see above.

The nice thing is that I can go home on the weekends, but I hope, once I get my camera which I left back home, to stick around, explore a bit, and maybe snap a few photos as I get a better feel for the town. If nothing else, I can do a better job of this than I did in the U-C and so maybe I won't be as eager to leave as I was this past school year.

Gracie

I was lying when I said that David was the only other Asian. There is also Gracie, a short, elderly, wrinkly, ashen-faced Chinese woman who comes to kitchen every week. Gracie does not speak very much, but when she does, most people cannot understand what she is saying. She often lingers at the house after meals and sits in a chair reading and keeping to herself. In some ways, she is in her own little world.

Once, Gracie had been sitting at the table for a long time and people in line were getting upset. Someone tried to say something to Gracie and she began screaming and yelling at the person. The rest of us just kind of shrugged...there wasn't much that could be done; she was going to take as long as she wanted to drink that bowl of soup and that's how it was.

Rumor has it that Gracie used to be a professor at the university. They say that she had a PhD in math and then something happened. Society calls this "losing one's mind," but for some reason, I want to believe that it wasn't so simple.

David

David is the only other Asian in the soup kitchen. He is also the only one who is there every week. Part of this is because he lives in the adjacent housing complex, and in exchange for the new housing he is supposed to help out in the soup kitchen. Still, he says, most people don't really help out. I sense a twinge of resentment.

David's job is the dishes. He is proficient at what he does, to a frighteningly frantic degree. As he puts it, in addition to the jolly rancher kool-aid and coffee, he doesn't do anything else.

Whenever he needs to wheel the coffee cart out into living room area, he tells me to stand by the door until he comes back. Then he opens the door and scurries into the throng of homelessness and scurries back, making sure to shut the door quickly, always with a look of nervousness on his face.

New volunteers are always nervous around David. I was no exception. David tends to give the impression that he's bossing people around. I don't think this is the case. Some will just follow his directives and others will ask "what gives?" Shaun was one of the latter. He and David are not on talking terms. Shaun insinuates that David is afraid of black people. His suspicion may not be without warrant.

I tell David that my parents are moving to Cali.
"Oh yeah, where?"
"Laguna Niguel"
"Oh, I've heard of that..."

Turns out, David is from Cali.

"What's it like?"
"It sounds like one of those new developing, ritzy suburbs..."

Douglas

Douglas shows up to help out. He is dressed in a three piece beige suit. I'm a little confused, even if it's his first time on the job. Douglas is 16. He and Shaun are supposed to help me out with the bag lunches, but the fact that the two are classmates reduces the effective help I receive. Douglas needs to go take a smoke break--before we start. It is 9:30 in the morning and this will not be his last one.

I think about how lonely of an activity smoking is. Then again, most addictions tend to isolate people from the rest of society, unless we're talking about online gaming--but that's another point altogether.

Douglas is from Mississippi. When I ask him what he likes to do in his free time, he says "this." He can't wait to get his own car and get his own place in his name.

Shaun and Douglas chat while they bag chips. Shaun tells Douglas that there's this thing that some bands do where they go out into the woods and jam.
"I ain't goin out to no woods with no white people...I ain't never gonna come back!"
Shaun points out that he's black too, and that this is different. Douglas still isn't satisfied.

Shaun recounts at time at school where some speaker comes in to talk about equality (I assume racial equality). The speaker had said something to the effect of "I know you guys want equality..." to whcih Douglas had shouted out "We don't want equality, we want payback!"

He's a nice kid, this Douglas. He came out of jail and like Shaun, seems to have come from some unstable family situations. When I ask Shaun why he [referring to Shaun] kept coming to the Catholic Worker House, he tells me he liked "the people." I imagine if Douglas keeps coming, it will be for the same reason.

Immunology

Many of our lectures involve discussion of various experiments that have been aimed at determining what causes a particular disease. Different treatments will aim at blocking particular mechanisms so that the body doesn't respond detrimentally. While there is no doubt that some of this research has lead to remarkable progress in treatment (for example, rheumatoid arthritis). I often wonder how much of these new drugs/therapies, while precisely targeting the molecular causes of a disease, are also merely addressing the symptoms of greater lifestyle issues. I know that saying that a person has disease "x" because he eats Oreos everyday isn't altogether true, but by the same token, I wonder if for the individual, the sandcastle of medical research is only as good as the periodic tides of social ills allow it to be.

In other news, school wraps up on the 22nd and it looks like I'll be spending some time in Detroit, the city that everybody is fleeing, and Irvington, IL, a rural town where few live to begin with. In between, I'm looking forward to spending time at home before heading out to Peoria in August.