Ben’s “Doctor for a Week” Experience

Ben & Dr. Dan

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about Isaac, Ben and Jennifer spent a week in Orange County.  In Ben’s high school, seniors are required to complete a senior project.  The idea is for each student to choose a profession that they would be interested in pursuing after high school, find a person who has that job and be “mentored” by him or her for 30 hours.  After the mentoring is completed, the student then is required to write a paper and deliver a power point presentation to the school board members about the experience.  One of the doctors who have monitored Ben since his diagnosis of hyper-mobility syndrome is the physician’s assistant at the orthopedic office.  Ben and Jennifer call him Dr. Dan.

Since the beginning of the year, Ben has  been thinking of becoming a physical therapist.  After his contact with Dr. Dan, he felt that spending time with him as a mentor would give him some good insight into this type of a profession.  Accordingly, during a visit to the orthopedic office, Ben asked Dr. Dan if he would be his mentor and Dr. Dan replied that he would need to talk to the management to find out if such a thing could happen, but if so, he would.  Management said yes as long as Ben followed HIPPA laws.  Since the boys are off for 3 weeks during winter break, it was decided that the last week of the break would work.

In the time leading up to Ben’s week of mentoring and in conversations with Dr. Dan, it became clear that for this idea to work, Ben would need to shadow Dr. Dan throughout the day and would need to be at the clinic at 8 0’clock every morning.  Jennifer and I talked it over and came to the conclusion that traveling up and down the hill early in the morning each day would be impractical.  To alleviate the potential problems, we decided that it would be best to find a hotel near the orthopedic offices that would allow Jennifer to take Ben to the clinic at the agreed upon hour in the morning and give her a place to stay while she waited for him to finish his day.  I was able to find such a reasonable Days Inn only 5 minutes away from the clinic.

Since we are dealing with the financial repercussions of Ben’s appendix episode (a topic I have avoided because it does not put me in my “happy place” L), Jennifer’s parents helped us out in order to secure a week’s stay for Ben and Jennifer (we are very grateful to them for the help as well as my parents and siblings who have assisted us in dealing with the medical bill).  Isaac and I have held down the fort while Ben and Jennifer have spent the week in Orange County.  Thankfully, this arrangement has worked very well and Ben really enjoyed his opportunity to spend time with Dr. Dan and Dr. Wagner, an orthopedic surgeon, at the clinic.

They arrived home today, and Ben told me about his experiences.  He’s been taking a sports training class at school and said he learned more on his first day with Dr. Dan than he has in the two semesters of this class.  The great part about this week of mentoring was the hands on experience.  For the most part, Ben would watch and not say anything, but every once in a while, either Dr. Dan or Dr. Wagner would ask him questions.  Also, the doctors would not stifle him when he felt impressed to say something.  Ben told me of a time when he felt impressed to mention his experience in the pain management program to one of the patients.  He also had conversations with a couple of other patients when he felt a need to speak up.  There was another time when a college student was also shadowing the doctors and Ben responded to a question correctly after the college student did not.  He said that he felt really good about that moment. J

Ben & Dr. Wagner

The reason why he worked with Dr. Wagner as well was because there was one day when Dr. Dan had to leave early because his wife wasn’t feeling good.  Dr. Wagner took over the mentoring and allowed Ben to continue with the day.  After Thursday, Ben had 32 hours of mentoring (2 over the set limit), but he wanted to finish out the week.  Unfortunately, Dr. Dan wasn’t feeling well on Friday and Dr. Wagner wasn’t in the clinic that day.  Apparently the other physicians weren’t as keen on having a high school senior shadow them, so Jennifer and Ben went to some places in the area after checking out of the hotel and came home a little early.  This was a great experience for Ben; so much so that he’s thinking of modifying his physical therapist idea and perhaps becoming a physician’s assistant like Dr. Dan.  I’m glad that these doctors gave him the opportunity to see this profession close-up and allowed him to expand his horizons. J