Moving Forward

This has been a pretty busy week and I feel like I have gotten a lot accomplished!  I did a lot of work not only on my senior project, but I also worked on my plans for summer and for next year!

As part of my senior project, I am continuing to work with the Napier family and the Zebra Run.  This year we have decided to expand our outreach.  We will donate part of the proceeds to CSF, which is the organization I am starting a North and South Carolina Chapter for.  I am also helping Jason Thomas, the organizer of the run, find new sponsors.  If you or anyone you know would be interested in sponsoring the run, please email me at mackenziemathis@live.com.  This is tax deductible, great advertising, and helping a cause that will impact many lives!

This week I spoke with the woman in charge of setting up local chapters of CSF.  Neither of us could sit down and talk for long, so we decided to set up a phone conference between my mom, the director of CSF, and the two of us.  This will take place February 10^th.  I will have more information about the chapter after the phone conference.

I spoke with Dr. Bingham this week about having an educational meeting at Spartanburg Regional.  We are thinking about having it sometime in March.  Dr. Bingham will speak first and give an overview of Chiari and EDS.  Then, Dr. Cannon, my family doctor who works with Dr. Bingham, will present a case to the audience.  The case he presents will be ME!  I will follow him by telling my personal experience with Chiari and EDS.  I think this will be great for the residents and other doctors to hear and will hopefully help them diagnose quickly patients that have these “rare” conditions.

As far as my research paper goes, I have enlisted the help of Dr. Cannon to learn how to write a case study.  He is looking through his medical textbooks for me, so I hope to get started on it this week!

Wednesday night, I received a call from my wonderful neurosurgeon!  It is always great to talk to him and catch up with him, but this was a special phone call.  After asking each other a few questions, he brought up the subject of an internship this summer.  We have discussed this several times in past conversations, but not to this extent.  He suggested that I split my time between his office and my geneticist’s office in Baltimore.  The house where I would stay is directly in the middle of Bethesda and Baltimore so it would work out perfectly!  We will discuss this in more detail when I go back to Maryland in a few weeks.  We will have to plan out possible dates and figure up the costs before we can make a decision.  Hopefully this will work out!

One last bit of news… I received my acceptance letter from Anderson University this week!  I am very excited about the prospects of going there next year!  The next step for me is to take the SAT again and apply to AU’s Honor’s Program. 

Lots of Progress... And Even More To Do!

I apologize for the delay in posting. A lot has been going on since the last time I posted. I was in Maryland for more than a week over Christmas break which allowed me to work on my senior project with Dr. Henderson. I have also been able to talk to several people about it.

First of all, I have great news about the TV interview that was canceled. We thought they decided to drop the story all together, but while I was at Dr. Henderson’s office one day, Kyri called me and said they wanted to reschedule! Dr. Henderson and I were so excited and set the date right then! We will be flying to Maryland on Feb. 3rd and the interview will be Feb. 4th. We are so thankful that they still decided to do the story!

Dr. Henderson called my mom this week with more great news about our trip. He has a friend that works with the Washington Post and he has arranged for an interview with them at the same time as our trip! I will post that article and interview as soon as they are published!

Another thing to be accomplished on my trip in February is a meeting with a website builder. Dr. Henderson and I thought it would be a good idea to use the company who built another doctor’s website, because he wants to link their websites. I will still be responsible for filling in all of Dr. Henderson’s information and maintaining the website. Our goal is to have the website up and running as soon as possible!

When I was in Maryland over Christmas break, Dr. Henderson asked me to join him for lunch. I quickly found out that he had ulterior motives for this lunch. He ended up spending the majority of the time trying to convince me to go to medical school. I fought him the whole time on the idea, so he said for me to just pray about it and see what God wants me to do. He did not know that I had been praying about it for a long time and it took him and several others saying to me, “You would be a really great doctor, so you should go to med school!” So needless to say, I have decided to become a doctor! Since making this decision, I have seen everything fall into place for school and have talked to 3 different doctors about it! I feel very good about my decision!

In making this decision, I added another aspect to my senior project! The last day I was in Maryland, I went to work with Dr. Henderson for the day. I was very excited about it! He picked me up at 7:30 then we went to visit one of his patients in the hospital. Due to HIPPA laws, I could not see the patient. We then went to his office and saw patients from 9:30 to 5:30. It was a hectic day and we were rushing around the entire time and only had a 10 minute lunch break which consisted of PB&Js. Even though it was a crazy day, it was one of the best days of my life! It reassured me that I definitely want to be a doctor!

Right now I have several projects I am working on. I will list them because they have been explained in earlier posts.

-The meeting with the Residence Program at Spartanburg Regional

-Starting the NC and SC Chiari/EDS support group

-Learning how to write a case study for my research paper

-Beginning promoting the Zebra Run

-Talking with patients about my experience and giving tips about surgery and living with EDS (This is an ongoing and lifelong project I will do!)