July 19, 2013 at 5:29 p.m.
Ahead of her class: Rhinelander teen juggles high school and surgical job shadowing
Ahead of her class: Rhinelander teen juggles high school and surgical job shadowing
Growing up, she was the child who was disappointed on her first day of kindergarten because there wasn't any homework assigned. While other kids were playing tag, she pretended she was on her way to college.
To her mother, Francy Zastrow, it wasn't Ryley's thirst for learning that was the most impressive. It was her early interest in medicine.
"She's always known that was her path," Francy Zastrow said. "When she was seven years old, she had a big doll named Amy. One day, she wet down some paper and laid it down on the doll's legs. When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was practicing skin grafting."
Ryley Zastrow graduated from Rhinelander High School this spring and will be attending UW-Madison in the fall. There she'll major in Biochemical Engineering, beginning down the path to medical school.
She'll enter her freshman year a few steps ahead of her classmates though. Due to her determination and a little dumb luck, she's already spent a significant amount of time in the operating room,
"When I was a freshman, I injured my plica, which is the lining in your knee, playing basketball and it got inflamed and needed to be removed," Ryley said. "My grandfather had just had surgery and they let him watch. That was never presented as an option to me because I was only 14 and they thought that was pretty young to see that. They didn't think I could handle it, but I tried to convince them. I knew I wanted it."
Even her mother wasn't sure about the idea. She admits now though that for someone like Ryley, it was really the only option.
"I didn't know if she could handle it either," she said. "But they didn't realize how much she wanted it."
So she remained awake and watched her surgery on a monitor while her surgeon, Dr. Kent Lowry, operated on her knee.
Following the surgery, Ryley approached Lowry with an idea.
She wanted to spend a great deal of her senior year in the operating room with him, observing surgery and learning about the profession. There was only one problem - nothing like this had ever been done before in Rhinelander.
"She brought it up to me and was very enthusiastic, self-driven and motivated about the idea," Lowry said. "This all came about because of Ryley. I was just there helping the opportunity happen."
Because this was a brand new idea, there was a lot of planning to be done before the proposal could even be considered. It was a process that started near the end of her freshman year and wouldn't come to fruition until she was a senior.
"I talked to Dr. Lowry and my principal Mr. Diztler and they were both very receptive to the idea," Ryley said. "So I started scheduling my sophomore and junior classes to have most of my coursework out of the way by my senior year. I needed as much flexibility in my senior schedule as possible."
She was impressed with how cooperative her school was with her plan. It was a new and rather ambitious idea, but instead of shying away from a break with tradition, they encouraged it.
"Mr. Ditzler said he had been wanting to do something like this for a long time," Ryley said. "He didn't necessarily envision it being in medicine, but the nontraditional classroom experience is something he was interested in, so he was really excited about my idea."
While she received plenty of support from her school, the medical side of it was a different story. As Lowry started contacting hospital officials about the shadow program, he ran into significant resistance.
"There was a lot of concern about whether the patients would be receptive and around the process we have in health care regarding doctor-patient confidentiality and if that would be protected," Lowry said. "Those were concerns and we also received backlash at the hospital deeper into the system, wondering if there was any real benefit for a high school student to do this. I helped push through with it to open up this opportunity though. I wanted to see where it would go."
By the time her senior year arrived, preparations were complete and Ryley was ready to begin shadowing.
"The first surgery I saw was a knee scope for a meniscus and I really enjoyed learning exactly how you need to prep before you go in," she said. "I watched someone get a spinal tap and saw how the anesthesiologist preps for surgery and even how the operating room is prepared before the patient is even brought into the OR. It was all the behind-the-scenes things that you don't get to see as a patient."
Even with all her skin grafting experience with her doll, her first time watching a real surgery, other than her own, was an eye-opening experience.
"It was sort of an 'aha moment,'" she said. "It just reinforced my desire to go into medicine."
From the very beginning Lowry said he was impressed with his young student's genuine interest. He said she made sure she got every last bit of potential out of the experience.
"She was a spong that was constantly absorbing," he said. "The work she produced was astounding. She was assimilating knowledge that a medical student would often assimilate."
Zastrow says Lowry was an exceptional teacher.
"If I had a question, he'd answer it right away or if we had a patient in the morning, he'd tell me to grab the X-rays and check it out before he came to look at it with me," she said. "He always took the time after surgery to explain things to me if I didn't quite understand, even if that meant drawing a diagram to help me get it."
As her senior year passed and she spent more and more time inside the operating room, Zastrow found herself strongly considering her teacher's speciality as a possible career path.
"I like the overlap of sports medicine in orthopedics," she said. "I did play basketball and the ability to help student athletes and athletes in general would be great, but the thing is you can really help the general population too."
Now that Zastrow's shadowing experience is over, the future of programs like this remain in doubt. As far as Lowry is concerned though, this is only the beginning.
"This process has opened up the idea to me that there is so much opportunity out there for people that you can make so much more out of any opportunity," he said. "This could have been a situation where she comes in and watches me work, but she turned it into much more than that. As far as where this goes in the future, it takes the right student and the right motivation. There's certainly the opportunity there to do it again."
As Zastrow prepares to go off to college, she's already laid out a multi-year plan she thinks will take her where she wants to go.
"After undergrad, hopefully I'll be off to medical school," she said. "I'd love to stay at UW-Madison, but I'm not going to rule out any other med schools right now. After that, it will be on to a residency where I'll strongly consider orthopedics."
It may sound like she's thinking a little too far into the future, but that's always been the case for this most remarkable young woman. The little girl who was preparing for college in kindergarten and practiced medicine on her doll has come a long way.
From what Lowry's seen, he said there's no reason to believe she won't blow past all of those goals.
"It's her choice," he said. "The limit is set by her. It will be fun to watch where she ends up and I hope she keeps me in the loop."
Andy Hildebrand may be reached at [email protected].
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