My TCCC Internship - Eilonwy Shugars, Delta High School

Me and Dr. Mandell

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a doctor. But when my Career Choices teacher, Mrs. Blankingship, started talking about internships I could not imagine finding a medical internship that was not going to be more than filing patient papers. When I was starting internship with the Tri-Cities Cancer Center, I was super excited as well as nervous to be in a medical institution, without being a patient. I knew I was going to be spending time in three different areas, but I wasn’t sure what exactly I was going to be doing on a daily basis.

The month of September was spent learning the ins and outs of the nursing area of the clinic. I would help the nurses take back the patients and go in with the doctors. It was amazing to observe doctor-patient interactions. I was able to gain a different perspective from the patient point of view,which I feel I have mastered, and the doctor point of view, which I hope to master in the future. I would have to say that my favorite experience during my time in this area was where I had gone in with Dr. Mandell. While she was chatting with the patient when out of the blue either the patient or a family member of the patient, complimented me on my shoes. Now I know that that was a petty sort of compliment, but it meant the world to me. It signified to me that I was capable of being personable to a patient as well as professional.

I spent October back in the dosimetry lab, learning the ropes of patient treatment planning. Alot of what I did was the contouring of the organs of various CT scan using the program that the dosimetrist complete the actual treatment plans with. I had to do some reading every week because the contouring I was going to do was based on the text of the textbook I got to read. Every week I essentially had this a unit that I had to complete the reading and then I got to contour the organs. Shelley Cole and Kristi Rhodes showed me the ropes of the program, and were available to help me with any questions I had. I enjoyed being able to use the computer, to essentially create this hypothetical person, or at least a portion of one, that was displayed anatomically on the screen in front of me.

During my time with the dosimetrists, I also had the pleasure to work the medical physicist, Rex Ayers, and help him perform a quality assurance test on a patient’s treatment plan. I was shocked when we went into the room, he handed me the pendant to the machine, and essentially said here is what we are doing, here is how YOU are going to do it, and I will be right here making sure you don’t run the table into the machine. These treatment machines are huge, and being a high school student, I surprised that I was even going to be able to touch it, let alone make it move. When we were outside performing the actual tests, he did the same exact thing, he told me how and when to essentially deliver radiation to a theoretical patient, and the entire time I had nothing less than an enormous grin on my face.

November and the first half of December has been spent with the radiation therapists. I was able to complete the lining up with the lasers, with patients actually on the table. This time around, I wasn’t able to pretend that I was delivering the treatment to the patient. Mainly due to the fact that the patient was actually on the table, and I do not have the training or hold the certification to actually deliver the treatment to said patients.  However, I believe that the more important experience was being able to get to know the patients that were being treated during the afternoon for the short time that I was there. I remember early on in my time at this “station”, that I came into the room as they were taking the patient off the table and taking her out of the room. She pats me on the shoulder and says, “See you tomorrow.” She quickly became my favorite patient to see after school. I was able to listen to her stories as we were setting her up on the table, and it was just amazing getting to learn about the person that we were treating.

My internship has been nothing short of amazing, and to be perfectly honest, it reaffirmed my belief that I need to be in the medical field within the first week. I not only learned the inner-workings of a medical facility and how the different roles of people mesh together to make operations of a medical facility  as smooth as possible, but I was also able to get to know people who truly care about their patients. You can see it in the way with the patients and with each other to provide the best care for the patients that they can. My experiences here at the Cancer Center have shown me what it means to be a health-care provider, regardless of what specialty you are in. Professional, personable, dedicated, and caring; these are the attributes I have learned through my experiences at the Cancer Center that are important to my career path. I will take these lessons and experiences and use them to improve the world that I live in, by improving the world of others. I hope one day I can be a fraction of a team of extraordinary people that make a difference in people’s lives every single day.

Eilonwy Shugars
Delta High School
Class of 2014