6 min read
Alex Laigle, who interned at Rumford Hospital for six weeks this summer, poses at the hospital’s Hallway of Honor with his grandmother, Valerie Allen, a nurse supervisor at Rumford Hospital. (Bruce Farrin/Staff Writer)

Alex Laigle, 16, of Rumford has been interested in a career in the medical field most of his young life. He got keen insight into the profession over six weeks this summer, becoming the first volunteer high-schooler in the last seven years at Rumford Hospital, shadowing doctors and nurses there and at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.

“When I was 7, I remember going up to my mom and saying I want to be an anesthesiologist. It was the weirdest thing and I was obsessed with spelling anesthesiologist. The truth is that I heard they make a lot of money and they save lives. And I don’t come from a ton of money. Since I was a little kid, I wanted to get out of small-town Rumford and go to cities.

“Initially, it was for financial stability, which is kind of why I moved into this,” he said.

As he got older, Laigle said, he started researching other medical options. “I wasn’t that dead set on it at the beginning, when people asked what I wanted to do. ‘Oh, I want to be an anesthesiologist.’ But I didn’t know anything about what that process would be like, or how I would move forward with that. What college I wanted to go to. So it’s something I had to learn as I went on. Now I don’t even know if that’s the field (anesthesiology) that I want to go into.”

A scholarship to Gould Academy

Laigle, who skipped a grade in school, completed his sophomore year at Mountain Valley High School when he earned a scholarship to go to Gould Academy in Bethel. “I’m very grateful for that opportunity.”

Heading into his junior year at Gould, he did not know much about the programs. “They started explaining to me about their four points, kind of like capstones for each year.”

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“They have a different one for each year. For my junior year, we’d been in the woods for two weeks in the winter and kind of survived off the land,” he said. “The senior four point is kind of a do-your-own project. Kids will do a variety of different things. Somebody made his own mountain bike. Somebody is getting his pilot’s license. There’s somebody doing a podcast.”

At first, he was confused because no one had explained it to him ahead of time.

“Then, all of a sudden, I had to get this ready, to do this great big thing for my final hurrah in high school,” Laigle said. “I was talking to my college counselor about it and she said you’ve got to do something that you want to do.

“What you really want to do is something that you enjoy and do something meaningful. That’s how I kind of got the idea,” he added.

He knew he wanted to do a shadow program in the local hospital and explained to his school what he wanted to do.

Then on June 1 came the system shutdown of the Central Maine Healthcare network because of a data breach and he couldn’t reach anyone to get a program started.

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“I am lucky to have a grandmother, Valerie Allen, who works as a supervising nurse at Rumford Hospital,” said Laigle, “I reached out to her and said I could not reach anybody, and told her that I really need this to happen. She was my mentor. “

“She reached out to many people and I had to go to many meetings and email so many people, including educational coordinators. It was not easy. Eventually, I was able to start shadowing doctors in the middle of July,” he said.

Allen explained, “I don’t know how this would have unfolded if he didn’t have somebody in the hospital. I think it would have fell through the cracks. . . . I didn’t even know that we did things like this in the hospital. So it was kind of an eye-opener for me as well. My manager was a huge help as well, as she knew who to call.”

Laigle said he started off by having a Zoom meeting with somebody at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.

“I explained my situation and what I wanted to do. At first, I wanted to volunteer in Lewiston. But I explained that I could do job shadowing as well, shadowing different doctors and nurses, and that really piqued my interest.”

Shadowing doctors and nurses

Laigle said he shadowed a hospitalist, emergency department doctors, a general surgeon, and a gastroenterologist, a medical specialist who diagnoses and treats disorders of the digestive system.

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One day in Lewiston, Laigle said he worked a 12-hour day, participating in a GI bleed simulation in the emergency room. This is a training tool used in medical education to practice managing patients with gastrointestinal bleeding, which is a high-stakes condition that requires rapid and accurate response.

“With this program, I was not able to touch a patient in any way, but I could help with little things that a doctor needed, like if they needed an extra suture kit or help cut the strings of a suture,” he said. “I was able to ask questions or interact with the patient. It was a really great experience.”

During this internship, Allen said a couple of nurses starting calling her grandson “Doogie Houser,” the title character of a television show in the late 1980s based on a young doctor.

Laigle completed his internship at the Rumford Hospital on Aug. 20 with a total of 76 hours. He worked every Tuesday and Thursday, eight hours a day.

Lessons in medicine

“I initially sought out this project for firsthand insight into a doctor’s daily life to confirm my commitment to this path,” Laigle said, “but it quickly became more than that. This experience has shown me not just the challenges of medicine, like the long hours and tough cases.”

Laigle said the process has also shown him how rewarding it is to support patients and families, how much there is to learn about patient care and the collaboration that goes into it.

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“It’s strengthened both my passion for learning and my desire to pursue medicine in the future,” he said. “I know it won’t always be easy, but I am inspired by the chance to face these challenges and even more eager than ever to make a long-lasting, good impact on people’s lives.”

Laigle said he would encourage other students to give it a shot if they’re looking at a career in the medical field.

“Working in the field of medicine is not all sunshine and rainbows,” he said. “I really love to learn. There’s so much more you can learn, every single day. With that career, if I pursue that, I’ll be learning every second of my life. And that’s something that’s really important to me. And not only learning medical terms, facts or different things, but also compassion and teamwork. All these doctors and nurses really don’t get the credit for all the work they’re putting in. It’s really amazing to see it all play out.”

Laigle said it’s now the time of year to begin applying to colleges. One of the colleges he is looking at is Bowdoin College in Brunswick. His internship hours can be put on his applications.

“I want to experience new things and find what I really enjoy. I’m really excited for where this is taking me,” he said, adding that pursuing a career in medicine will include four years of undergraduate school, med school for four years, and a residency for two to seven years depending on the specialty he chooses.

Bruce Farrin is editor for the Rumford Falls Times, serving the River Valley with the community newspaper since moving to Rumford in 1986. In his early days, before computers, he was responsible for...

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