Friday, June 21, 2013

Week 1- Julie

Starting off my summer immersion was very exciting. This week I got to see surgeries in different departments, visit patients during consultations and post-operation office hours, and learn about research from a clinical setting. Since I spent the last 3 weeks working at a hospital in northern Tanzania, I have experienced bloody surgeries and had gotten over the initial shock of seeing patients and their families in distress. However, each case is very unique and I still struggle to process the emotions. Seeing surgeries at NY-Presbyterian this week may have included more technical equipment than surgeries in Tanzania, but the people are the same. They still face difficult, sometimes life altering, procedures and this is the key aspect which I will continue to face over my time here in NYC. While visiting patients in office hours I observed the level of emotion different families face when they come to the hospital and how surgeons deal with these emotions. I am hopeful that through this clinical immersion experience I can gain a true insight into how our clinical system can process these diseases and traumas, as well as the emotions and experiences of the real people affected by them.

In the clinical side of my experience I spent many hours in the operating rooms, viewing different surgeries. I have also observed the process of preparing a surgery room for a patient, prepping the equipment and maintaining sterility, as well as the process of releasing the patient from the OR room. I have spoken with surgeons in plastics, vascular surgery, anesthesiology, and neurosurgery and learned the most difficult parts of their procedures and why they use certain tools. It was interesting to note the similarities in the surgical organization from facial reconstruction, to mastectomy, to vascular grafting, to hernia removal. It was exciting to note places where biomedical engineering technology also played a role, such as synthetic plastics which aid skin reconstruction, tools to search for the sentinel node of a patient to make sure it is removed and ultrasound technology to determine levels of blood flow. In the coming week I hope to not only see more surgeries, but better understand how the patient came to have these procedures.


In the laboratory I was able to learn from Dr. Spector’s lab personnel about the key projects in the lab. From viewing a rat microsurgery to attending lab meeting to learning how to make collagen constructs, they have helped me significantly. Although I have not chosen a specific project yet, I know that it will deal with creating artificial collagen microvasculature constructs for in vitro or in vivo experiments. The in vitro goal is to seed vascular cells onto these constructs and obtain the same cell structure as native human vasculature. If I work on the in vivo side of the lab, then I would try to create a collagen scaffold with microvasculature that can be anastomosed to a rat’s vasculature and integrate with its system. Both of these projects interest me as I research atherosclerosis, and it would be helpful to learn about different 3D vasculature models. In the coming week I want to chose a project and begin to learn skills in the lab to achieve my goals.

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