Summer Medical Electives

Like a man with bipolar disorder (minus the depression phase), I figured signing up to MedQuest for a summer elective wasn’t enough; so I signed up for another elective right after! As I type this little article away, I still don’t know what I was thinking, or why I was so keen about keeping myself so busy this summer.

For those who don't know, MedQuest is a program run by medical students with the intention to encourage highschool students to choose a career in healthcare. One of the main problems is that Southwestern Ontario lacks many healthcare workers, and to compound this problem, students are 3x less likely to apply to such programs in comparison to urban regions such as Toronto. MedQuest intends to encourage more students to go towards such careers and to hopefully comeback to their hometown one day as a healthcare worker.

For my first elective, Marielos, Ahraaz and I went to Leamington to organize the MedQuest camp. Leamington, known as the Tomato Capital of Canada, is a little town that’s about a 45 minute drive from Windsor. One of the first things you notice about the town is the different cultural mixes – it’s full of German Mennonites, Mexican Mennonites, and many Portuguese, Italians and Lebanese. The other thing we noticed right away was how friendly the hospital staff was! Initially we thought it was the generic ‘we welcome you’ type of friendliness, but soon we realized that it was a truly amazing set of happy healthcare workers. The best way I can describe how happy I found the hospital environment is to just let you imagine everyone, including myself, on Prozac all day.

The best part of doing an elective in a small town, as you know from rural week, is that you are exposed to a lot of hands on experiences. In Leamington, we learned how to put in IVs (at the expense of some poor patient’s veins), take histories in the ER, scrub in the OR, and listen to tons of murmurs. Furthermore, I got to watch/help with two births, as well as more paps than I can count. Which brings me to my next point – I don’t know whether to feel bad for all the things women have to go through or to just admit that women are the stronger sex. So now that I’ve distracted myself with women, I’ll move on to the next distraction. I can’t count how many times the nurses and a bunch of patients who gave me this advice – “If you want to have a happy marriage, the key is to say ‘Yes dear’”. While this was amusing to me, it often came out of nowhere in the middle of a conversation! It was just as bizarre and amusing when one of the nurses wanted to set me up with her sister – thankfully I didn’t say ‘yes dear’ to that suggestion. Before I stray back to my review of my summer electives, I’d like to point out to the guys reading this –saying “yes dear” to your lady is probably a good idea unless she asks you if her new dress makes her look fat.

My overall experience with MedQuest would be best described as priceless. It was hectic to try to balance your day at the hospital, running back home to organize the camp, make tons of phone calls to physicians, people to sponsor food, answer too many emails, find supplies for suturing, casting, create lectures, and so on. It was difficult at times to remember that I was actually on a summer break. At times we stayed up until 2 am organizing various aspects of the camp for the 30 grade 10 and 11 highschool students, and somehow we had to find the energy to wake up at 7 am to get ready for the hospital. If it wasn’t for the unbelievably friendly family we stayed with and the amazingly friendly staff at the Leamington hospital, I don’t think I would have stayed sane throughout the 6 weeks I stayed there. I was also lucky to have stayed with two great classmates, who I now know so well. However, there were some bumps, especially with the late nights planning, but Ahraaz, Marielos and I came out alive and a lot closer than when we had first started.

The best part of MedQuest was the final week when everything we had planned began to unfold. Everyday we watched our highschool students grow closer to us, learn a lot about healthcare, learn a lot of hands on procedures, and most importantly – develop the confidence to know that they can achieve their goals. After we finished a large mock disaster involving the students, fire department and the EMS, we wrapped up the week by thanking the students for making this camp a worthwhile experience for us. The students surprised us with thank you cards, hugs, tears and memories that will forever be ingrained in our memories.