4th Week of Immersion

This week was pretty good overall. I continue to work on my research project, although not much has materialized so far. Right now, I am just looking at medical records to see where a RA patient cohort got their primary hip implant. Requesting for medical records is fast enough, but the other side of the project had not gotten started yet. I will be more aggressive this week in trying to see how I can help with examining the pathology of tissue slices from these RA patients. However, requesting for the pathology samples is just slow in general so hopefully everything works out.

I saw an open heart surgery this week through rotations in the CT set up by Cornell. The surgery that I saw was an aortic valve replacement. They started the procedure by cutting open a hole slightly to the left of the sternum of a 69 year old male. Once they got through the skin and muscle, they needed to use a bone saw to cut through several of the ribs around the heart. Then, they used metal clamps to open up the chest and keep it open. I was standing right near the anesthesiologist so I was able to see a beating heart up close! After, they hooked up a heart and lung machine to reroute the blood around the aorta. Once complete, they shut down the heart by pumping a potassium dense liquid through the heart (called Cardioplegic solution); this caused the heart to stop beating but protected the heart from cell death while the procedure continued. Once the heart was stopped and cooled down (to 10C), the surgeon (Dr. Girardi) continued to cut open the aorta and remove the defective valve. Once the valve was removed, they had to sew up the aorta with the new bovine replacement valve. They finished up the surgery by starting up the heart again and reconnecting everything once the heart was up to full strength. It took about 4 hours to complete.

Another surgery that I saw this week was a C-section. I went to the NICU and asked if they had any surgeries that I could watch and luckily, they brought me to the OR with a soon-to-be mother. She was 30 years old and this was her second C-section. It was a pretty straightforward procedure where they made an incision through the abdomen and cut through till they got to the uterus. They carefully cut through that to reveal the baby's head; after which he was quickly pulled out. Overall, the surgery was more bloody than I was expecting. It was probably because they didn't want to cauterize much around the uterus in fear of fetal or nerve damage. It was a very cool thing to see. The baby seemed to be fine and everything went smoothly. 

Other than that, I was shadowing Dr. Goodman and did some little things with other doctors. I went to the CAP clinic again (see previous posts) but this case was not nearly as interesting as the last few have been. Looking forward to more things in the future.