1-22-2010: Shadowing Dr. Larrimore

Today I shadowed Dr. Larrimore who is an OBGYN in Covington, GA. I arrived at her office a little before 9:00 because she was doing a procedure at 9. However, her patient did not sign the consent form to allow me to view the procedure, but I was able to follow a midwife who works in her practice. The midwife did an ultrasound on a woman who is pregnant with triplets and showed me how to read an ultrasound. That was really cool because Dr. Larrimore said that she has been in practice since 1996 and this was only the second case she has had in which a woman was going to have triplets. The midwife also checked the heartrate of the baby of a woman who was about 15 weeks pregnant. By the time we had done that, Dr. Larrimore had finished the procedure. She had removed a benign tumor from a young pregnant woman and showed it to me.

Then we went to the hospital and saw three patients. One woman had just had twins and was in a hospital bed recovering. She was having a sharp pain near her right hip and Dr. Larrimore said that she may have an infection and had a nurse do a urine test to check for infection. The second woman we saw was having contractions and about to have a baby. We just went in to check on her and see if she needed any pain medication. The last woman we saw had just had a baby and was leaving the hospital that day. We also went to the area of the hospital where they keep the babies right after they are born. I talked with the nurses that work there and they told me all about their job and how peaceful it is unless they have a baby that is going through drug withdrawl because they are always irritable from being weened off of whatever drug their moms were on while they were pregnant. We also met and spoke with a radiologist who had done an X-ray on one of Dr. Larrimore's patients. Dr. Larrimore said that they usually only work halfdays on Fridays and I left during lunchtime around 11:30.

Now, I am about to write in my shadowing log about what I did today and I am going to write up a rough draft of the western blotting procedure we have been doing in the lab for my paper.