Corner Canyon junior Camila Alejo is looking for opportunities to figure out possible careers.

“I want to figure out what I want to do and take classes that I’m interested in,” she said. “I like science and saw this was a medical talk and thought that it sounded like something that I want to do because I already tried coding and know it’s something I don’t want to.”

Alejo came to listen to Corner Canyon High’s Meet the Pro speaker, Mikel Borup, and learned more about his route in emergency medicine and a possible one for her.

“I learned there is a possibility of paying for my medical training through a military scholarship so that gives me a new option,” she said.

The point of the Meet the Pro series is to give students a chance to widen their perspectives about professions, said Canyons School District Career and Technical Education Director Janet Goble.

“Students are able to ask questions to industry professionals to deepen their understanding of the careers,” she said. “We want students to know more about their field of interest and in particular with this one, learn the career options within medicine.”

Borup did his residency at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and was stationed in the panhandle of Florida. During his three years there, one of his deployments was with an emergency care team to Somalia to treat Afghan refugees. 

“We’d do a surgery on a patient, then we had to transport them in a C-130 to a larger base or a hospital where they could take care of them long term,” he said. “We did 14 surgeries in a very small, sterile environment. We tried to limit the surgeries to as little as possible because of that. The area I was in, there were military working dogs and no veterinarian on that base. So, we treated military working dogs that got injured.”

A few years later when the government pulled troops out of Afghanistan, Borup teamed up with the Navy and Army medical staff to provide examinations for “civilians who had helped us throughout the war and were at risk with the Taliban. We made sure those refugees weren’t bringing any diseases into the U.S. that would be dangerous.”

Borup owes his medical career to his freshman college computer class.

“I wanted to do computer animation, so I started with my first computer programming class and decided it was awful. I switched my major to genetics, and that’s when I decided I wanted to do medicine,” he said. “In my third and fourth year of medical school, I did clinical rotations and one of those I did was emergency medicine. After my first week, I knew this is what I want to do.”

Borup said “it’s a long road into medicine” with about a dozen years of college and several exams. Every specialty in medicine, he said, attracts a different personality. 

“In emergency medicine, I feel it attracts those who are adrenaline junkies. I love freestyle skiing—jumping out of planes to ski. I also love going downhill on a bike. It gives me a rush and that’s how I feel when I can help someone who comes in the ER,” he said.

Borup balances his time in the ER with his recreation and family life. He works about 15 shifts per month, from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. He often works weekends and holidays, but he can request off on days his children have events. 

Another benefit? Wearing scrubs.

“I don’t like to dress up, so it works better for me,” he said.

During his residency, Borup made about $13 per hour or “about what a Walmart employee makes,” he said. “For three or four years you’re living off minimum pay and working as hard as you can in your life, but it is one of the most memorable times. You make some of your best friends in residency because you’re together constantly.”

In medicine, Borup told students that they work as a team, especially in residency.

“Every shift, I’m calling a specialist about a patient. Every single shift, I’m consulting another doctor, or working as a team with nurses, techs, respiratory therapists. It’s incredibly important that you’re on the same page,” he said. “It’s also important that if you want to do medicine, you can’t have any real bad semesters on your transcript. It’s extremely competitive to get into medical school.”

Borup said that many people don’t realize that emergency medicine is a board-certified specialty as it is often overlooked by other specialties.

“When someone has a heart attack, they are treated by the cardiologist, or if it’s a broken bone, they go to the orthopedic surgeon. But it’s the emergency doctor that sees them first and kind of resuscitates them until the specialist can see them,” he explained.

Borup’s talk highlighted some of those he treated not only abroad, but also locally as he explained the endoscopy procedure to see that a child swallowed a snowflake keychain that got lodged in his esophagus. He said his skills have been used outside the operating room, such as using his kitchen table to examine his nephew who got hit with a baseball bat.

He showed students how he uses an EKG to determine if a patient is having a heart attack and X-rays to see where a teen’s chest was punctured with glass during a car accident.

“This is what’s called a tension pneumothorax,” Broup explained to students. “The lung collapsed on this side, and it’s pushing the whole trachea because of the pressure on this side. You can go into respiratory failure and not get any oxygen and you can die pretty quickly from this because it’s reducing the amount of blood returned to the heart. We do what’s called a forward pass and we put a chest tube in to relieve that pressure so the lung expands again. It’s all what we do in the ER.”

There was a time during school when he considered quitting his medical pathway, but he’s glad he pushed through.

“I love the fact that I’m able to help people at their most desperate time. That’s really what attracted me to this specialty,” Borup said. “It is extremely gratifying to be able to help those who are in need.” λ