During the third and fourth week, in addition to starting to plan what will be my summer intern project, I have continued participating in diverse interventions and shadowing doctors in different departments.
During the third week, I had the opportunity to shadow Dr. Howell in the emergency department. I personally did not find it to be an exciting experience since during my time in the emergency department the cases attended were simple, less severe, and a bit repetitive. However, one of the patients arrived with severe abdominal pain and bleeding. This patient had undergone a sterilization operation to stop the bleeding, but the problem continued. After certain analysis, the patient was diagnosed with uterine fibroids and was transferred to radiology the next day. Once in the interventional radiology department, Dr. Schiffman was responsible of performing the uterus fiber embolization.
What is UFE (uterine artery embolization)?
It is an angiographic procedure used by interventional radiologist to embolize (block) the blood supply to the uterus. By limiting blood supply to the uterus, the fibroid will shrink and its symptoms subside, Figure 1.
Figure 1. Uterine artery embolization procedure
Furthermore, I spent the fourth week shadowing Dr. Bishop in the Pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). During our time together, we monitored the healing process of different patients that had undergone cardiac surgeries. In addition to shadowing DR. Bishop, I had the opportunity to return to the interventional radiology and shadow Dr. Sista who was performing various installations and removals of inferior vena cava (IVC) filters. An inferior vena cava filter (IVC filter) is a type of vascular filter, a medical device that is implanted by interventional radiologist or vascular surgeons into the inferior vena cava to presumably prevent life-threatening pulmonary emboli, Figure 2. Also, Dr. Sista executed various thrombolysis and balloon angioplasty.
Figure 2. Inferior vena cava filter
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