As the my immersion experience continues, I continue to gain a great deal of perspective for clinical work and the medical field as a whole. By now, I have had the opportunity to see patients throughout their entire experience: consultation, pre-op, surgery, post-op, and weeks after recovery. This has really helped me to understand each patients story and operation. It is truly amazing to see an entire surgery and see the patient recover to full heal, with little indication the surgery has ever occurred. One particular case that was shocking, was seeing an elderly patient who had an entire jaw reconstruction (she needed her jaw bone removed due to a tumor). Dr. Spector showed me images during the surgery and then we examined her reconstruction 6 months later. To my untrained eye, I could barely tell she had such an extensive surgery done.
In the OR, I observed a hernia repair, tummy tuck, cleaning and reconstruction of a below knee amputation, as well as a scalp and face repair. I have become familiar with some of these surgeries, but each time I see them I learn new things. In the lab, I have continued working on my project and have made some significant progress. We created tumor vasculature microenvironment of varying stiffness and begun to observe the effects of stiffness on cancer cell migration, intravastation, as well as vessel integrity. After discussing the project in more detail with Dr. Spector at the end of the week, I have a solid plan to finish my project strongly and with some good data. I am very excited to see what I can accomplish in these last two weeks.
NYC has been exciting as ever, and with the help of my lab mates, I have seen some of the more "hole in the wall" places across the city.
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