By Leanna Duong (class of 2018)

Ever wondered what barium tasted like? Well, today the students at Developing Virtue Secondary Girls School discovered that the answer to that question was a definitive “not very good”.

In the morning of March 21, 2017, the Ukiah Valley Rural Health Center kindly took the DVGSSers on a tour of the hospital to give the enthusiastic students—Leanna Duong, Jasmine Chen, Betty Shen, Kylie Kok, Brandy Quach, Sinna Zheng, Denise Cao and Christina Park—a glimpse of what working at a hospital would be like. Throughout the tour, we interacted with specialists and saw the operation of medical equipment in action. At one point, we were even lucky enough to have an incredible opportunity to watch a live barium-swallowing test operated by the hospital’s speech pathologist who even let us try a little gulp of barium ourselves. By the time the three-hour tour was over, we must have met with over ten specialists ranging from nurses to pharmacists to kitchen chefs!

After finishing the tour—and I am sure that I speak on behalf of all my classmates, we gained a wider perspective on what it meant to be working in the medical field. We used to believe that just doctors and nurses work in hospitals; but as we learned today, there are a lot more specialists invested in making the patient experience satisfying than just your standard doctor and nurse. There are nuclear imaging experts to take the patient’s x-rays, speech pathologists to help them rehabilitate, pharmacists to distribute remedies, and, last but not least, chefs to fill some bellies.

All in all, coming to the hospital was an unforgettable experience and we are so thankful to the staff of Ukiah Valley Rural Health Center for letting us have this opportunity to widen our perspective and take a detailed look into what a job at a hospital might be like.