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.
No comments:
Post a Comment