Breanna Vang - Biomedicine Lab

Hello everyone! My name is Breanna Vang and I am a senior at Clovis East High School. In my first year at the Center for Advanced Research and Technology, I was in the Business & Finance lab. We heavily focused on budgets after high school, investments in company stocks, and lastly securing our own business to show off! This year I am now in the Biomedicine lab which includes English, Advanced Topics in Medicine, as well as Clinical Anatomy & Physiology. CART as a whole has impacted me as a person by improving my social skills and confidence in both classroom and personal life.

After finishing my first project in the Biomedicine Lab, we started working on our showcase project. Showcase at CART is a life-changing experience because it is open to all students in each of the 14 labs, including their family members. There are many professionals that come to the labs and some give out internships as well. For my showcase project, my 2 partners and I chose a patient injured from a car crash because it is a very common emergency nowadays. Our teachers provided us with information such as her medical background, vitals, and diagnostic results. Using this information and more tests, such as the Airway Breathing Circulation assessment (A.B.C), we found that our patient was suffering from a splenic hematoma. Using our knowledge from Advanced Topics in Medicine, we knew the term “splenic” meant spleen, the prefix “hema-” meant blood, and finally the suffix “-toma” defined as cut. This means there was a cut on her spleen that led to blood leakage in her body. The spleen is an organ that filters and stores 20% of the body’s blood. It means our patient’s situation was life threatening and could lead to death. Luckily, using our previous understanding and tons of research, we gave her a splenectomy which is the surgical removal of the spleen, abdominal laparotomy to remove internal bleeding, and a type B+ blood transfusion to bring back her blood levels. The patient was able to recover within 6 months, take daily medications for 3 years, and lastly have many vaccines because they are vulnerable to infections without a spleen.

For the actual showcase day, we had to present during both school hours and after school. This meant we presented to our peers at CART first thing in the morning, and later on in the evening our audience was mostly family. Using a poster board, we were able to show all of the patient's information from vital signs to her prognosis. While informing others of our case study, we had two models to demonstrate the amount of blood the patient’s spleen lost and an inside view of the spleen's anatomy and physiology. Both models were homemade, the first was a sponge attached to a 3D model and the other was fully clay. Many of our audience members were amazed and now educated on the spleen. We even had two audience members listen in without knowing they were professionals! They were surprised at the amount of medical knowledge we knew at a young age. 

Right now in class, we finished up our nervous system unit and are now moving into the senses of the body. Learning about the nervous system was nerve wracking because there are many cells, impulses, and functions in one test. In English, we are preparing our scenes of the play Othello so the class can have a better grasp of Shakespeare’s story techniques. Although my part includes singing, I know my classmates will cheer me on throughout the way because here at CART we are a joint school!

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