Today might just have been the coolest day that I’ve ever experienced up to date. Jonathan and I didn’t actually start the day at Carolina Ear and Hearing Clinic though; instead we woke up at 6:00 to shadow Dr. McElveen in an operating room at Duke Raleigh Hospital. When we arrived, we scrubbed up and received our official name tags to then follow Dr. McElveen to an operating room where he would preform a tympanoplasty operation.

In the operating room, Dr. McElveen explained to us that the patient’s ear drum had collapsed when her Eustachian tube (a passage that permits the equalization of pressure on both sides of the ear drum) acted as a vacuum and sucked the ear drum in on itself. The collapse caused a tear in the ear drum, so the patient had a large hole in it. To correct this, Dr. McElveen cut cartilage away from the back of the patient’s ear and augmented it to her ear drum to patch up the hole.

The “middle  ear” of the patient during surgery, showing the stapes and incus bones as well as the folded-back tympanic membrane:

After the successful surgery ended, we celebrated with some pictures with Dr. McElveen and in our scrubs:

We then headed back to the Carolina Ear and Hearing Clinic where Dr. McElveen set Jonathan and me up in the clinic’s temporal bone lab. He let us probe a temporal bone and it’s ear cartilage, and it was really cool! However, we did find out how hard it is to actually be a surgeon from this because of how precise your instruments need to be held, and how hard it is to keep your hands from shaking when probing the patient’s body. The ear canal is so narrow that I felt like I was playing Operation since I wasn’t supposed to shake the probe and touch the sides of the canal!

Dr. McElveen demonstrating how to probe the temporal bone in the bone lab:

Jonathan probing the temporal bone:

After we (half) successfully probed the temporal bone and the ear cartilage, we had our lunch break. After lunch, Dr. McElveen had to leave to go to South Carolina to perform a surgery there. Thus, Jonathan and I separated and I went with one of the audiologists to examine a patient with a tumor on their hearing nerve called an acoustic nueroma. She conducted several tests on the patient in order to determine whether it was worth it for Dr. McElveen to attempt to save the patient’s hearing capability in the ear and remove the tumor, or if he should just incise the hearing nerve in order to remove the tumor, which would ultimately render the patient deaf in the one ear. One of the tests was to lay the patient down in a dark room and put plugs in her ears that would send sounds through her nerves and a machine would measure how long it took the brain to receive the sound. The patient had to lay completely still so that all of the body’s focus would be on delivering those sounds to her brain. Apparently she was laying so still that she actually fell asleep during the test! This was okay though according to the audiologist because the data still comes back accurately. After several tests, the audiologist determined that it would not be worth it for Dr. McElveen to attempt to save the patient’s hearing capability.

Today was such an amazing experience since we did so much observing and hands-on activities! I will never forget being in that operating room and observing the surgery; my jaw was dropped the whole time as I was in such awe of what Dr. McElveen was doing throughout the operation! It was also a very formative experience, and it definitely sparked my interest in possibly going into surgery as a career option. – Kiran W.

Day 1 at the Carolina Ear and Hearing Clinic was already a restless one… Dr. John McElveen had over 40 patients to attend to, and we were at his side in the examination rooms the entire time! When Jonathan and I arrived to the clinic at 8:00 AM we were first suited up with lab coats so that we at least looked the part of doctors (even though we didn’t fully understand all of Dr. McElveen’s medical jargon). The morning started with a staff meeting that we sat in on where the upcoming month pertaining to all of Dr. McElveen’s surgeries was discussed (mostly at least… an engagement was also announced during the meeting which provided some well-needed excitement to wake everybody up on an early Monday!). After the meeting, Dr. McElveen had to rush to get on a conference call, so some of his nurses took Jonathan and me on a tour of the office and let us sit in on some of the hearing tests performed by the audiologists. The audiologists were very good at explaining what they were doing as they went along, and what all of their charts indicated in the patient’s file. After Dr. McElveen’s conference call had ended, he pulled us out from the hearing test rooms as it was time for him to begin examining patients. We hopped from room to room as Dr. McElveen examined the patients’ ears. Conveniently, on his magnifying device that he looked into to see the ear canal better was a camera that displayed and enlarged Dr. McElveen’s procedure on a television screen. Most of the times it was really cool to be able to see real-time footage of Dr. McElveen scanning the ear with his instruments (he was very good with pointing out certain things in the ear to explain stuff to us as he went along); however, some of the times it was kind of gross, like when he removed all of a patient’s ear wax or scraped away their dried-up ear fluid. The worst was when he used a suction tool to suck up all of the patient’s pus-like ear fluid. Jonathan and I stood there staring at the screen pretending to be professional and unfazed by the nauseating pus-fluid, but we later admitted to each other that we were both repulsed by it. After seeing all of these repulsive and gross bodily substances, it was time for our lunch break… perfect! Despite this, lunch was actually really enjoyable because we became much more acquainted with Dr. McElveen’s staff who is a really fun group of people. After our lunch break, Dr. McElveen had Jonathan and me research some common medical procedures and terms such as cochlear implants and otosclerosis. One of the nurses then explained to us how some of the advanced hearing aids worked and how to custom-program them to meet a specific patient’s needs. After this, we rejoined Dr. McElveen and continued shadowing him in the examination rooms until the office day was over at 5:00. Although Jonathan and I complained to each other throughout the day about standing up for too long without sitting (it’s actually a pretty challenging task that we are not accustomed to doing on a daily basis), we have absolutely nothing to complain about regarding our day as a whole, or the Carolina Ear and Hearing Clinic. It was truly an amazing and informative day, and we cannot wait to shadow Dr. McElveen in the operating room tomorrow during a surgical procedure! – Kiran W.