Good day!

Today we presented our semester projects for General Medicine in Athletic Training. We all picked a topic, and answered some form of the question, "How should the Certified Athletic Trainer deal with _________?" We did research all semester, put everything together on a giant poster, hung them up in the hallway outside the teaching lab, and gave a 5-10 minute presentation to all our Athletic Training teachers, as well as a few of the Exercise Science professors and our classmates from different years. Then everyone said "Oh that is so interesting, good job!" and we were told we all looked real nice.
Think junior high science fair. Except we were talking about hearts and Sudden Cardiac Death and diabetes and ACLs and Heat Exhaustion instead of growing grass with coffee or testing toothpaste on eggs. Oh, and we all knew what the fuck we were talking about.

My project was titled: "Proper Management of a Prolapsed Mitral Valve in a Competative Athletic Setting." Mitral valve prolapse is a disease of the mitral valve between the left atrium and ventricle. It's an inherited disease that causes the valve to form improperly. It can be anywhere from asymptomatic and you may never know you have it, to completely stenosed (scarred with plaque) that it is useless and allowing blood to travel backwards through the heart. Blood traveling the wrong direction is very bad, and is likely to cause an arrhythmia. As a future athletic trainer, it's my job to know what to do and know how to prepare to take care of an athlete with a prolapsed mitral valve.
For the most part, it's all about knowing your athletes, knowing if anyone has this, and what their symptoms are. Also having a set Emergency Action Plan in place if the kid were to go into a fatal arrhythmia.

I was next to Lisa who did her project on Sudden Cardiac Death, and Ryan who did his on Hypertrophy Cardiomyopathy (when the walls of your heart get abnormally thick and therefore decrease the amount of blood your heart is able to pump - it usually leads to Sudden Cardiac Death). Which is ironic, because we had no idea we would create Cardiac Corner when we stuck our posters to the wall.


And here is MY KNEE. I had a follow up with Dr. Smith today and she let me keep the copy of a copy of my Xrays. Look at that joint. The top bone is my femur and the two on the bottom are my tibia and fibula. Look at how much SPACE there is between them! All that space of full of PERFECTLY HEALTHY cartilage and a meniscus.
I'm up to running 4 cycles of 2 minutes walking/3 minutes running. On Saturday I get to add another cycle for 25 minutes total. Next week, I'll be on a 1/4 cycle, first for 15 minutes, then 20, then 25. After that, I'm allowed to increase the time I spend running by a minute every week, so 1/5 then 1/6 then 1/7. Once I get to a 1/10 cycle, if there is no pain after two weeks of running for 33 minutes total, I'm allowed to go to straight running with no walking breaks. I have to cut it back down to 15 minutes total to start, but then I'm allowed to add 5 minutes a week until I'm counting by miles instead of minutes.
Dr Smith thinks that a 5k or even 10k by the end of this summer is very doable, and that I could be doing a half marathon by this time next year if I wanted - just to make sure I actually find a training schedule to follow rather than doing what I did last time, which was just go out and run as far as I could every day.

And tonight, I'm going to a "tupperware" party my classmate Lisa (same one as above) is throwing. You know you are an athletic training student when the sentence, "I was able to score one of the 6 gallon Gatorade coolers for the punch!" not only sounds normal, but is something you have done in the past.