But, a certain experience this past week did make everything in the city totally worth it. I was observing my mentor in the operating room and we came across a very interesting case. A patient had a knee replacement back in 1999, and the entire medial half of the plastic implant was completely worn down and some of the metal implant even wore off. The result was a tremendous amount of necrotic tissue (completely black for those haven't seen necrotic tissue before). My mentor handled the situation by removing all of the dead tissue, removing the implant (which wasn't easy), and readjusting her knee by implanting a totally new knee replacement. As an engineer, I would like to figure out why exactly that first implant performed so poorly after fifteen years. Overall, this was the most exciting surgical experience I've had so far.
Besides my time in the OR, I was hard at work this week learning new research techniques. Harvesting articular cartilage from mouse knee joints is not an easy task! But each time I'm getting a little better hopefully. Next week, I'll learn how to perform some qPCR and see how well I did harvesting the cartilage based on the quality of the RNA. Next week, my main focus is going to be research - both for my clinical project and PCR work.
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