You Will Be That Help Someday: Inside the Kidney TREKS Program
PNWU Student Doctors Ana Caudillo, Karla Saenz Reyes and Ryan Voelker recently returned from the one-week Kidney TREKS (Tutored Research and Education for Kidney Scholars) Program. Sponsored by the American Society of Nephrology and hosted at the University of Chicago, the week-long program is designed to foster interest in careers in nephrology and research through a week-long research course retreat and long-term mentorship program.
For the fourth year in a row, PNWU had the highest number of Kidney TREKS applicants in North America, with three PNWU Student Doctors selected to attend.
Student Doctor Voelker recently joined us to discuss his Windy City experience, and the benefits such courses offer to the education of our student doctors.
“…And then we will talk to some real patients with PKD,” exclaimed Dr. Arlene Chapman, professor of medicine at U. Chicago. She looked thrilled – as if she had just paid off her house – but she was a nephrologist, and that’s what nephrologists do; they thrive on helping patients and students learn from one another. A prominent educator, Dr. Chapman was one of the many exceptional physicians in the Kidney TREKS program.
Left to right: PNWU Student Doctors Ryan Voelker (author), Karla Saenz Reyes and Ana Caudillo pose in front of Chicago’s famous Cloud Gate — commonly referred to as “The Bean.”
If you’re a PNWU student, TREKS is one of the opportunities you’ve heard Dr. Mark Baldwin rave about during his expertly taught Renal lectures.
Truthfully, our renal system was stressful enough. Most students heard the extraneous information about extracurricular programs and forced the details from one ear to the other. But it was one of those opportunities that I tucked away in my subconscious.
When it came time to apply – my more organized friends and fellow classmates reminded me – I looked at the application and decided it was worth a shot. I had no real expectation of being selected, but when I was, I was forced to confront the feared renal system that was so dreadful to learn, but so rewarding to understand.
After a long flight to Chicago, we sat tired and jetlagged in a conference room at UChicago Hospital, which was located past an elevator bank and through a maze of whitewashed walls and linoleum floors that are an eerily distinct commonality among hospitals.
The morning lecture discussed Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD), an insidious and devastating illness. It wasn’t enough to just teach what the disease was and its pathogenesis: we had to meet it in real life; confront it and the pain it causes.
We were meeting real people that suffer from such a destructive disease.
We were put into small groups and shuffled off to clinic rooms. We sat down and waited, and a tall, fifty-or-so-year-old Caucasian male with a balding head and a kind smile entered the room. He greeted us warmly, sat down in a chair in the corner, and spoke softly – but confidently.
He introduced himself as “John,” (though that wasn’t his real name), and told us he loved these opportunities to talk to real medical students before they go into clinical practice.
“Ask me anything,” he said kindly, which was paired with a request that we not embarrass him when we shared what we learned. He also asked that we keep his family out of the later discussions.
We all nodded in silent agreement.
We went around the room, with students asking John about his daily life. What did it look like? How did he feel? What pain did he carry? What did he think about his illness?
John admitted things many patients never do when faced with this externally invisible disease.
He admitted to pretending the symptoms weren’t present, and even explained that he kept his diagnosis of PKD from his wife and family. He expressed a sense of shame, but he was a “problem solver” and wanted to “solve the problem” before alerting his family.
He’d scoured the internet, he explained, looking for random cures, herbal teas, exercise regimens – anything that could help. After about a month of searching, he told us, he accepted that nothing would offer the “quick fix” he wanted.
He broke down, and he told his family.
“That must have been really hard,” said a student. “You know, it really wasn’t,” said John. When he finally came to that moment of acceptance and told them, he explained, nothing changed. “They still loved me,” he said. “I was still Dad. I was still John.”
“I think we get so wrapped up in what our diagnosis means for ourselves,” he continued, “that we forget we aren’t alone. It’s not just our families that are there for us, it’s our doctors.” This, after all, was why he was willing to have these private conversations with medical students.
“You are going to have a real moment when you’ll have to be there for patients,” John said. “You have to know where they are coming from. They need to know they aren’t going to be alone on this journey.”
He explained that his doctor – Dr. Arlene Chapman – gave him her email, her cell phone number… he paused and admitted how crazy it was for her to do that.
Left to right: PNWU Student Doctors Ana Caudillo, Ryan Voelker and Karla Saenz Reyes.
Rather than loss, John explained, his diagnosis had given him a community. It gave him opportunities to meet people on the forefront of research; to see things moving forward, and hope ahead.
He talked about his family and his job. He chatted about how minority populations are often discriminated against when it comes to medical care, especially dialysis. We discussed his children and his concern that they may one day have the disease. He even talked about how he came up with a system to change his daily habits to keep himself as healthy as possible, for as long as possible, to put off transplant.
We spoke with John for an hour, but we could have talked all day.
When we returned to the conference room to talk about what we’d learned, there was a universal agreement that the experience had truly changed our perceptions of our future patients.
In medical school, we get so wrapped up in looking at people through the lens of an illness that when people bridge that gap and show us the "human side" behind the illness, it's eye opening.
We left that conference room as very different medical students than we had entered.
Nephrology is often considered by medical students as the most important but difficult of all systems courses, at least at PNWU. TREKS spent each day discussing complicated topics like acid base disturbances, calculating GFR, kidney stones, and renal physiology (content which would make Dr. Oestreich far too happy). During the program, we often were split into groups and assigned projects that resulted in PowerPoint presentations full of memes and graphs to explain our findings.
The program also offered a chance to spend a lot of time out of the classroom – visits to the Mexican Consulate to screen for PKD and trips to the grocery store for nutritional education for families with kidney disease on a budget were deeply integrated into the program to help medical students understand the impact of kidney disease on the families we will one day treat.
Putting students in the shoes of everyday patients to experience the outside obstacles those patients face will produce more empathetic and understanding doctors.
Not a day goes by that I don’t think of John, sitting in his little chair in the corner, smiling and saying: “We all come from different walks of life, but we all need a little help sometimes. You will be that help for someone someday.”
“We all come from different walks of life, but we all need a little help sometimes. You will be that help for someone someday.”
Ryan Voelker, OMS III
Third-Year Osteopathic Medical Student
Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences