Teens raise awareness

Nicole is a 16-year-old PH patient

Every year at school I am assigned a science project to do. I wanted to educate people about pulmonary hypertension, so I did a project on it. The first part of the project was a background paper, which is basically a short research paper. I did that on PH, and I used PHA’s Pulmonary Hypertension: A Patient's Survival Guide as a main source. The second part of the project is the actual experiment. It pertained to the effects of sleep (or lack thereof) on a chronically ill child. I would stay up late at night, and starting at midnight, would add 30-minute increments every night and wake up at 10:00 every morning. I did this for five days. When I woke up, I would check my blood pressure and oxygen saturation levels. My experiment came up inconclusive, as the data I collected was very erratic.

From Spring 2011 Pathlight.