Am I Legit Yet?

As project comes to a close, I realize that I have been given an incredible experience that not many high school students receive.  Being able to stand right next to the operating table while a surgery is going on is a sight and feeling that I hope I get to experience for the rest of my life.  That being said, I hope I'm not standing next to the table for the extended future...because that's boring. So boring. Now that I'm over the initial amazement of being in the OR and rushing around with surgeons and wearing scrubs like a boss, it comes to my attention that I stand for 8 hours a day watching people do what I want to do.  It makes me envious, irritated and bored at the same time.  I love being in the OR, don't get me wrong, but 3 weeks is a long time to stand around.  I want to do what they're doing but obviously for the sake of Cleveland, they don't let me operate on patients.

Looking at the bigger picture, this has showed me that I want to become some kind of surgeon, very badly.  It serves as a large motivational push to strive in college so I may go to med-school and succeed in the medical profession.  3 weeks is long for a project like mine but it's an experience I will never forget.

Garlic Mustard

This past week, Emma and I have been working with the conservation crew at the Holden Arboretum. Their main focus this week was on invasive species, meaning that we spent most of our time pulling garlic mustard on various Holden Arboretum properties. It is important for them to pull this particular plant because it is highly aggressive and can out-compete native plant species if left alone.

Garlic mustard

 This work began as a somewhat nostalgic experience for me because when I was younger and had friends over, my mom would make a deal with us: if we pulled garlic mustard in the garden, then she would buy us ice cream. However, it soon became a much bigger-scaled operation than what I had done back then. When a small team of us set out for a day of pulling garlic mustard, we stuffed our pockets with plastic bags and then dispersed to pull as much as possible.

After several hours of digging around in a dangerous forest filled with tangles of pricker bushes and poison ivy, we managed to hike out with many bags of garlic mustard! Success! 

A bag filled with garlic mustard

It was a ten bag day!

Doing this sort of work makes me really appreciate what these conservation crews go out and do. It's definitely a tough battle to try to control invasive plant species, so the fact that there are people who are still committed to it is amazing.

Life as a Conservationist

One thing that I have learned about careers in conservation with smaller park systems is that for many people, what they studied in school and got hired to do is not what they end up working in. Careers are much more focused around having a broad range of skills, and doing whatever your employer needs done or has funding for. For example, Brett, one of the employees of Lake Metroparks we were working with two weeks ago, went to school for and was partially hired to monitor bird and animal populations and diversity, but now most of his job involves planting, building and maintenance of the ponds. The people we were working with at Holden Arboretum could identify nearly every plant we saw, knew bird calls, geology, and a lot about maintaining a forest in general, and their status as "conservation crew" meant that they could be doing anything from pulling garlic mustard to delineating wetlands to petitioning the association to limit and close horse trails. Regardless of what they were doing, everyone we met on the job was there because they were passionate about preserving natural areas, allowing for plant and animal biodiversity, and providing areas for recreation and learning to everyone. As Amy, another person that we shadowed at Lake Metroparks, told us, it doesn't matter what you study, as long as you're learning something you find interesting and proving that you have the persistence to learn it, and it doesn't matter what you spend your life doing, as long as the same things apply.

A New Perspective

While working here, sometimes I forget that Friendship Circle is also a Jewish Organization.  In additions to the various projects that I have been taking on for them, I also have participated in some of Rabbi Yossi’s more spiritual responsibilities.  For example, the Rabbi has Torah study sessions with a few people this week.  During one of the sessions that I sat in on, I met a man who told me that he has been spending his time hitch hiking through Latin America.  He explained to me that he was meeting his friend in Buenos Aries, and instead of flying he hitchhiked through Mexico.  Not knowing any Spanish at the beginning, he learned Spanish as he travelled, made his way to Guatemala where he eventually got a job in a hotel and later as an English teacher.  Meanwhile, over the course of a few years, he never ended up making it to Buenos Aires.  He then came back to the United States, where he finished his college degree and just now began studying Torah again with Rabbi Yossi.  I got to see a completely new perspective on the way someone can live his or her life. By the time the study session had ended, we haven’t even flipped to the first page of our books.  Instead, we had a discussion about the different ways

The Importance Of A Child Life Specialists and Volunteers - Day Nine

One thing I have realized was that many children are left alone all day for several days of the week. Their parents either have to work, take care of their other children at home, or they simply cannot find time. I have learned to really appreciate the work that child life specialists and volunteers do for the children who are alone in their rooms all day. We supply books, games, and toys for children, and offer to be a "buddy" for a while. There's a playroom (activity center) that we open a few times a day as well. This gives the kids a chance to just be a kid and play around while they're in the hospital. There is one baby I have visited all week and his parents do come to the hospital, but they never spend time with him while they are there. He is unable to go the playroom because he is too young (only 2 months old), and they go without him. I don't quite understand that specific situation. 

Other parents do come, and stay every minute of the day with their child. I have so much respect for these parents who take off work. However, I totally understand that it is very exhausting to wait in the room and try to entertain their child, especially if their child is older. There was this one mother today and she was in the room the entire time I was with her daughter. She really appreciated me playing with her daughter for 3 hours because she was able to take a break downstairs in the atrium (cafeteria) and even take a nap. I could tell she was exhausted too. 

~Clare

Another Day

This morning I will be spending another day in Peds ENT with Dr. Arnold.  Time in Peds is very different from spending time with adults by process, energy and end goal.  Almost everything I've ever watched in Peds is tonsillectomy which is interesting the first few times, watching the bovine pen direction and then seeing the inflamed fleshy kidney shaped mass removed, however, with multiple tonsillectomies in one day and spending 4 or 5 total days watching them, they get very old, methodical and boring.  Part of what being a surgeon entails is being methodical and muscle memory, that much I have gathered.  But the part I hesitate with in Peds is how tedious the same task so often can be.  In Adult ENT, there are similar procedures but always different histories, lifestyles, diseases, mental states, largely varying ages and surgical histories.  There is also a larger field to work with which provides more room to work and brings more people into the room to assist with the often more involved cases.  Ultimately, this helps me decide that I do not want to go into surgical pediatric care which is very helpful.  And fortunately, this is my last day in Peds so from here to the end should be interesting and appealing.

Visions of Garlic Mustard

      For the last few days, Sarah and i have been laughing about how Gary, the "boss" of the 3-4 person segment of the Holden Arboretum conservation crew we're working with, must have nightmares or at least dreams about garlic mustard, the invasive plant that we've all been picking this week. But earlier today, I closed my eyes and found that the shadow of the spindly, tall green shoots was etched into my mind. After spending two days walking around canvasing the forest floor for the stuff, and hearing from Gary and the others about what it and other invasives can do to an ecosystem, I think that I really will have nightmares about it as well. It's not that the work is scarring. In fact, we're having the most fun we've had yet on project because we get to see beautiful parts of the arb not usually open to the public, and are working with amazing people. It's because garlic mustard is scarring.

       If you have an area of your backyard that isn't mowed or very well weeded, you probably have garlic mustard in it. 

images from: http://www.onlyfoods.net/garlic-mustard-alliaria-petiolata.html

If you do, you should pick it, and throw it away or burn it. You can spot the stuff along the sides of highways and roads, in backyards, and on the grounds of Lake Metroparks, where they've made the decision not to battle with it because of a lack of funding, and the seemingly unstoppable nature of its advance. It is biennial, and this is it's off year, but even in the area we were working in this morning, which has been managed for invasives by the Arboretum for years, five of us hiked out for lunch with ten trash bags full of adult plants. The plant takes over fields, the edges of streams, and patches of woods like the one shown in the second picture, where a break in the canopy lets in sun. It is extremely hardy and chokes out native species, and spreads its seeds through waterways, bird and animal scat, and mud that animals and humans track into different locations. Invasive plants in general tend to harm ecosystems by choking out the biodiversity and even the landscape of an area; if garlic mustard takes hold, it can prevent new trees form growing in an open spot, converting it permanently. 

     The debate among parks and people about whether or not we should pull invasives is a hot one; it takes tons of time, money and manpower, often involves the use of chemicals, and generally seems pointless given that not everyone in an area is going to eliminate the species on their own property, and so there will almost always remain a seed source. It takes a lot of resources, but as we've seen, areas that the Arboretum has maintained continuously, where they've made sure that there isn't an upstream or uphill seed source and perhaps that they've sprayed with a herbicide, contain very little of the stuff, and since the park's mission is as a preserve, the pulling makes sense. As I mentioned, Lake Metroparks doesn't pull garlic mustard, and Gary is currently trying to convince them to at least mow dow a patch of it that's directly across the street from a relatively garlic-free and hard to penetrate patch of Arboretum land that holds an endangered species of Ohio Rose. If the garlic mustard takes over that area, it very well could choke out this area, but since it is a rose and bramble patch it's very hard to maintain, so Gary needs to at least try to limit the seed sources. The effort to maintain biodiversity cannot be successful on a single tract of land; the neighbors, and everyone in the area, has to care enough about Ohio's nature to make an effort  and pull some weeds.