Week #7 (Nerymar Ortiz Otero): The End of the Summer Immersion

        In my last week, I spent more time seeing surgeries related with tumor resection, place shunt, and introduce a therapeutic agent. The surgeries are really similar to the surgeries that I saw before. In other word, this week was like a normal week where nothing special or exciting happened.

     One of the surgical procedure that I saw was the pituitary tumor resection via endoscopic approach. I have seen like 6 or more endoscopic surgeries during the summer immersion. However, in this something different happened. In this case, the patient had a cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leak through cavity where is the pituitary gland. At the begging of the surgery, the nurse injects fluorescein in the back of the patient to stain the CSF to can distinguish it from the blood. I knew that but I never see the function or use of the dye. In this case, I could see how they knew there is a leak because you could see the green fluid there (fluorescein). To fix that, Dr. Schwartz made a graft to close the space and avoid the leak. The graft is made using a fat flap tissue got form the patient at that moment. This is a rare complication that can occur during the surgery.

       At the end of this week, I thanked to Dr. Schwartz because he was a great advisor for me and I appreciated it. I am very grateful with him and with the program for this amazing experience. Is really good have the chance to observe the another face of the biomedical engineering. At the end of the week, Dr. Schwartz gave me and another students two books that are about the experience of resident students in neurosurgery field. Here give details about curious brain conditions to learn more about the neurologic field.