Cabrini High junior is immersed in medical field

   Briana Lawson’s account of “What I Did Last Summer” is unique, to put it mildly.
   For example, it is highly probable that Lawson is the only local teen to have spent part of her summer witnessing a real heart valve transplant, an artificial heart procedure, a hysterectomy and a full-knee replacement.
   How many people can say they had a blast manually probing the chambers of a pig’s heart or watching a miniature video camera being inserted into someone’s abdomen, as Lawson did when she had a front-row seat at a laparoscopy?
   “We saw full surgeries – cutting the patients open all the way to sewing them back up,” said the proudly non-squeamish Lawson, a junior at Cabrini High, who observed these medical procedures and much more as the sole Louisiana participant in the 10-day National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine presented at three North Carolina campuses: the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; Duke University in Durham; and Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.

Elite group

   Lawson, a 16-year old Cabrini honor student, was one of just 300 high school students selected for the forum, which exposes aspiring doctors to the daily grinds of medical students and working physicians in a wide range of medical specialties. To win a spot in the prestigious group, participants had to exhibit academic excellence, leadership skills and a potential interest in a career in medicine.
   “I really like learning about the body because I have a lot of unhealthy people in my family,” said Lawson, whose current class load at Cabrini includes anatomy and physiology. “I think it would be really cool to be able to learn about the medical condition of people in my family and tell them more about it if they don’t understand what the doctor’s saying.”
   Lawson, a parishioner of St. Maria Goretti Church, was nominated for the forum by her social studies teacher, Max Yuratich. She recalls falling in love with science as a seventh grader at Lake Forest Elementary School in New Orleans.
   “We got to do experiments in class – like making candied apples,” Lawson said. “My teacher just made science seem so interesting. She put so much passion into teaching, I was like, ‘Wow, this must be really amazing!’”
   In addition to witnessing several actual medical procedures via a live video feed, Lawson and her fellow forum attendees were put through a couple of faux scenarios, including one in which her team had to diagnose the illness of a mock patient named “Judy,” whose gallbladder was inflamed, contained stones and required surgical removal.
   Another memorable experience involved “reviving” a life-size male robotic doll that had gone into cardiac arrest.
   “He could breathe; he blinked; he had a pulse everywhere you can feel a pulse on your body,” said Lawson of the dummy, into which the mock physicians manually-pumped oxygen. “We didn’t do any mouth to mouth, but we got to put a tube through his trachea to help him breathe.”

Reality check

   In addition to all this “fun stuff,” the forum gave the teens a dose of reality. They had several opportunities to hear from actual medical students at the three campuses and discovered just how all-consuming their studies are.
   “I realized that medical school is going to take a lot of time and patience,” Lawson said. “It kind of threw me off at first, but as the program went on I decided I could hunker down and do this.”
   Lawson said the medical students’ main tip was to find some “stress reliever” to offset the relentless load of study and homework. In Lawson’s case, this will probably be cooking and baking.
   Yet another revelation resulted from the forum: Lawson now hopes to specialize in maternal-fetal medicine.
   “They deal with the mom during the nine months of the pregnancy, deliver the baby, and after that they’re done,” Lawson said.
   “I know maternal-fetal medicine is what I want to do now and I know what to strive for to get there,” she said. “I’m set on it!”
   Beth Donze can be reached at [email protected].