Blog 2024-11-08

The majority of this week was spent researching for my paper on general surgery. One of our assignments this week was to submitted a draft of at least 10-12 pages for our teacher to grade, critique, to ensure everyone will finish the paper on time. Luckily, I was able to submit a draft of thirteen pages, the last of which ends with half of a paragraph that will be expanded onto page fourteen. Over the weekend, my hard copy book, The History of Surgery by Harold Ellis, was delivered an acted as a major source of information in my history section of the paper. The book details surgical advancements dating all the way back to the primitives of surgery.

On November 8th, my biomed class conducted a sleep lab, titled the Enchanted City Sleep Study. The purpose of this study was to gather an understanding of the REM, rapid eye movement, cycles that occur when you are sleeping. There are four stages of sleep, stage one usually takes up to ten minutes to occur. In stage one, a person is between wakefulness and light sleep, sometimes accompanied by head bobbing or even denying having fallen asleep. Stage two, light sleep, takes 10-25 minutes to occur, and is when the eyes begin to roll side to side. While in stage two of sleep a person may experience a bodily changes including a drop in temperature, relaxed muscles, and slowed breathing and heart rate. The thrid stage of sleep is known as deep sleep and takes about 20-40 minutes to occur. Stage three is the deepest and most restorative stage of sleep and is often paired with sleep taking, walking, and dreaming. When a person is in this stage, it is extremely hard to wake them up. Finally, there is stage four, REM sleep. Stage four usually takes anywhere from 5-60 minutes and is the beginning of rapid eye movement from side to side. In this stage, pulse, breathing, and temperature are more like the body's awakened state. During the actual lab experiment, my class laid out on the floor with blankets and pillows and our teacher read the experiment's script while we tried to fall asleep. At the end of the lab, when everyone was awake, we were tasked with writing out everything we could remember from the script in order to determine if anyone was actually able to fall asleep.