The Last Day

I started the morning by going to Pancake Pantry with most of my proctor group. I had to wake up early, but it was worth it; plus, there wasn't a line outside the restaurant when we went. We all sat together and enjoyed our food because it was our last breakfast together.

Class was amazing today, and I am going to miss my instructors and classmates. During the first half of class, we learned about how to diagnose a patient's disease. We went over questions that a health provider would ask the patient such as their present illness history, their family history, their past medical history, and their social history. Kat, our instructor, pretended to be our patient who was having a sharp stomach pain and throwing up. The patient also had a strong history of alcoholism, so as a class we came to the conclusion that the patient had pancreatitis. Afterwards, we read an article on the vaccination debate. We came across a very interesting idea: Because vaccines have become so effective at eradicating diseases, the risk of vaccine reactions is higher than the risk of the disease itself. However, this is causing people to stop getting vaccines which is causing the risk of disease to rise again. I thought this was a very interesting pattern.

After lunch, we went to CELA again, but this time we had to pretend to be physicians in a mock hospital. In pairs, we had to help a patient cope with stress; I was paired with Chiamaka. We had to go in the room, and introduce ourselves. Then we asked the patient questions about her illness as well as her past history. We also performed a heart and lung exam on the patient. In addition to that, we also had to come up with a plan that would help the patient cope with stress. Chiamaka and I were a bit nervous since there was a medical student who was monitoring us though a camera in the room; however, overall, we did not do that bad. One of our weaknesses was that we did not properly acknowledge the patient when she was addressing her problems; one of our strengths, though, was that we used the information the patient gave us to establish a plan for her.

Before class ended, we gave Thank You cards and Dunkin' Doughnuts gift cards to our instructors while the instructors awarded us certificates. We also took pictures!

These are my instructors: Ian, Margot, Brian, Kat, and Katie.

This our T.A.- Meg.

We then had the closing ceremony; it was a very emotional ceremony, but I managed not to cry. The house cup winner was announced: S house. We were only thirteen points away! There was also a slideshow of pictures of all the different events that occurred during VSA; they brought back wonderful memories.

After the talent show, we received our yearbooks, and we signed each other's yearbooks.

We had another dance at 8:00; the theme was shipwrecked. I enjoyed the last dance. After the dance, we had free time, so we continued writing messages to each other. I also wrapped up my packing.