Hands-on anatomy broadens horizons for eastern North Carolina high schoolers

Hands-on anatomy broadens horizons for eastern North Carolina high schoolers

On the seventh floor of the Brody School of Medicine, in the pathology lab space, Rachel Smith stood in scrubs and nitrile gloves and lifted a dissected aorta, then a heart, then lungs, and turned them slowly around in her hands for a group of high school students. It's the first time any of these kids have seen real human organs up close. Appropriately, it's the first time they're hearing the words atherosclerosis, myocardial infarction and anthracosis - morbid conditions that could afflict these very tissues and organs in anyone and the reason medical science takes an interest.

Begun less than two years ago, MedPals is an effort to encourage medical science interest and a belief that anyone, from any background, can aspire to be a physician, the apex profession in medicine and the end result of eight years of training on average following college. So MedPals is also a talent search of sorts for the kind of early, promising young students in the east who may endeavor to become physician candidates like them.

"One of the core parts of our [medical school] is community outreach, to teach K-12 students about medicine," said Joanne Azar, a second-year student and president this year of MedPals. "We usually go out into schools and do modules there, but it's something very different when we can bring them here and have them experience what it's like to actually run a code in the simulation lab, to experience specimens we have in pathology and neurology that they would not see elsewhere."

Without passing around the specimen, Smith described how hard the lung tissue felt. "And see all this black? These bubbles are not participating in gas exchange. Consider it dead space in your lungs. What might that cause?"

Shortness of breath, one student whispered. She is correct.

A Premier Medical School Right Here

"When you graduate high school, you know, you've not done a lot of things," said Sasha Coward, a school counselor at Farmville Central High School who shepherded that group of students. "This exposure beforehand, this hands-on experience, makes it possible for them to decide if this profession is something they can see in their futures.

"Eastern North Carolina is so underserved that maybe we can help inspire them - and convince them they have something locally here to support their dreams."

Anatomy teacher Will Tyer said he does a lot of lab work with his students at Ayden-Grifton High School, though "nothing to compare to the reality of what folks are doing here at the medical school," before adding, "everybody thinks they need to go far away for these experiences - we have a premier medical school right here, 10 miles away."

Students moved from pathology to neurology, where they were shown brain specimens held by medical students who, with shiny lab pointers, identified the actual places on the lobes and stem where certain functions take place.

"I knew I wanted to be a doctor from when I was a kid," said second-year student Christiana Higgs, "and in high school especially, I was looking for programs exactly like this, but any program that I could find or that my high school had access to, you had to pay for. This is a completely free program" and included a lunch of sandwiches and wings.

Not So Far from Where They Could Be

The students moved from pathology and neurology down to the Interprofessional Clinical Simulation Center - "Sim Lab" - to witness and practice a hospital Code Blue using real equipment. Earlier this year, MedPals won Educational Program of the Year from East Carolina University. It has also earned the Creating Excellence in the East award from the Pitt County Board of Education.

Throughout the programming, medical school students were assisted by a platoon of ECU undergraduates. When second-year student Eduardo Castaneda arrived on campus in 2023 fresh from a high school classroom as a teacher, his vision for this whole program drew deeply on undergraduate talent.

"I reached out to undergraduates because their schedules are more forgiving, and to two Brinkley-Lane Scholars, Trisha Rangaraju and Kendall Pixley, who were already [doing work] in a lab here in Brody," Castaneda said.

An immigrant, Castaneda says he spent his early childhood working the plantation fields of Guatamala and didn't learn to read or write his name before the age of 10. Because of this, his first dream was to become a teacher who develops and inspires young minds. Then, as a teacher, he saw the ways disadvantaged students "don't get to see anything more than their circumstances" and began coordinating school outtings to universities in Durham and Raleigh.

"I needed these kids to envision themselves going to these places, carrying backpacks, going to labs, science classes, research libraries - places far away from where they were but not so far from where they could be," Castaneda said.

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