Work Experience Reflection
I spent one week with the Neuro-oncology team (and the oncology team) at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, as the doctors planned out treatments with linear accellerators and cyberknife machines, as well as when they broke the news of brain tumours to patients and their families. I was able to learn to identify different brain tumours on CT and MRI scans, then watch as doctors created treatment plans for each one, in an almost painterly style, layer by layer. I was then able to see and meet the people I had so far known only by their pathologies and grayscale scans, listen to them tell the doctors what they were experiencing, or sit silently as their disease was explaiend to them. I learnt the most empathetic ways to discuss treatment options amd was able to meet people who I never would have met otherwise, and understand their suffering, and then later the ways that doctors and nurses could try to allevliate it. I was able to observe people being told that their cancer had metastasised, that they would need another round of radiotheraphy to try and treat it, and that they would almost definitely lose their hearing. I undertood the importance of a multidiciplinary team both when sitting in on a speedy Pituitary and skull base tumour MDT, as well as when I found myself listening to a writer's delicately beautiful description of terrible migranes and was able to see the doctor contacting a neurologist and later on a neurosurgeon.
Furthermore, I was able to hear the doctor's grieviances with the NHS, the hospital trust and the management who oversaw the hospital with a detatched ignorance and understand the points I had been reading about for so long in newspapers in front of me. My day shadowing a registrar in the Lung Cancer unit was particularly fasacinating, as it showed me much more about the experiences of doctors in specialist training, as well as exposed me to the difficulties of such a demanding profession on a doctor's personal life, particulary when they have children.
Neuro-Oncology, though being one of the most academic specialities still showed me how central the patient experience is to medicine as a whole, and how research (far from being a purely detatched element of medicine) is in fact so central to medicine particularly because it has clinical significance, and I was lucky enough to observe the SAFER study taking place, which aims to determine Seizure activity before and after radiosurgery, as many of the patients' greatest grieviances were to do with the fact that they could not drive once diagnosed with a brain tumour (as the ban is based on largely anecdotal data), which often resulted in a loss of independance and social isolation.
This experience has only encouraged me to pursue medicine even more.