Shadowing Italian Surgeons and Soaking Up Sun

Senior biomedical science major Madison Forbes spent two weeks last summer shadowing surgeons at the prestigious Istituto Tumori Bari Giovanni Paolo II IRCCS Cancer Institute in Bari, Italy. 

Waking up four days a week at five in the morning for five or more hours shadowing surgeries, the opportunity was unlike anything Forbes experienced stateside. Though she’s worked in medical settings, she had never been in a surgery setting prior to being accepted into the Doctors in Italy Fellowship Program. 

Being thrown in the deep end of the operating room was intimidating at first, with Forbes and her peers hugging the walls for the first few days. “After those first couple days, we were all standing side-by-side with the surgeons, asking them as many questions as possible,” Forbes said.

She was given a level of access to surgical expertise and skills that weren’t available to her stateside. She soon discovered that if she showed up early, the surgeons would share extra background information and x-rays with her before scrubbing in. Pair that with a more direct level of access to patients and their information due to Italy’s lack of HIPAA (a federal law that protects the privacy and security of health information), and her time in the Italian healthcare system was full of surprises.

“My first day, they found an accessory spleen during one of the surgeries, which is just a nodule of splenic tissue that is not a part of the main body of the spleen,” Forbes said. Adding to the oddities of this fellowship, she was able to hold and study a uterus and several tumors. “This entire experience allowed me to be more confident and more vocal, so when I’m in medical school, I know to ask questions instead of being scared.”

The opportunity wasn’t all work and no play, however. She and her colleagues discovered several beaches, including the Pane e Pomodoro Beach just 20 minutes from their hostel, as well as the Castello Svevo di Bari (a medieval castle), and plenty of delicious food ranging from gelato and tiramisu to local favorites like focaccia barese and orecchiette pasta.

Forbes, a transfer student from ICC, also views her semester abroad with Bradley in London as an unparalleled opportunity. Pairing medical settings with learning abroad is the perfect combination for Forbes, who is set on becoming a surgeon in the future.

“It intrigues me to learn how medical schools across countries are so different,” Forbes said. “Italy was completely different from here. There's always that same baseline of care, but how they take it farther, that's what intrigues me and that's why I wanted to do the program outside of the country. Not many surgeons will let shadowers scrub in like they let us do in Italy, or get as close to the surgeons as we were.”

Forbes currently works at Carle Hospital as a patient safety companion providing one-on-one monitoring in the emergency department. In the future, she hopes to work in the St. Louis area, dealing with large-scale surgeries. The Doctors In Italy Fellowship Program helped reframe some of her efforts in and out of the classroom.

“It truly made me look at Bradley and all this hard work to show that it's worth it – that I can get through the undergrad classes, I can get my bachelor's and I can go to med school. All of this is leading to something good. I just can't stop trying.”

–Jenevieve Rowley-Davis