Week 1

My doc was unfortunately away this first week, but I managed to do a lot the first week of immersion. Day 1 began with an early morning trying to get access to everywhere in the hospitals with some difficulty and phone calls. To try and figure out how to Weill the week away (😜) I met with Yi who suggested I tag along with other students whose mentors are here.

On Tuesday, Nicole and I went to a seminar where they had a patient come up on stage and she was interviewed by the doctor. The head Dr. F lead the room of med students and fellows who discussed what to do for the patient. I felt bad for the patient as being examined on stage must have been embarrassing! They were having hip issues and had a suite of other health issues and medications. Afterwards, Nicole and I followed Dr. F who was kind enough to let us and we saw patients with him. He specializes in arthroplasties and checked up on hip replacement patients and initial consult patients. It was interesting to see severe RA firsthand as a woman had bulbous knuckles and even a dwarf who needed custom implants. 

On Wednesday I watched a hip replacement, arthroscopy, and total knee replacement. It was hard to see much of anything from behind the moving plastic panels but seeing the screen and watching Dr.F teach the fellow was cool. Orthopedic surgery is definitely a construction site! A sales rep for Zimmer was behind the panels with me and he was actually really knowledgable about the procedure, tools, and treatment options. As a sale person, he was able to speak to the design a good bit too. I ended the day working on some data analysis for work back in Ithaca. 

Thursday was really cool! Mandy invited me to residents' research talks, which were super brief but pretty interesting analyses of imaging data and population studies at the hospital. Afterwards, we went with Dr. Bostrom and watched a bunch of hip replacement surgeries and revisions. I also saw a crazy heterotopic ossification patient who was getting excess bone about a knee implant excised. It was a careful procedure trying not to damage good tissue but there was so much bone! Behind the knee and the patella was locked in place. They cauterized the hell out of the bone and cut it out in massive chunks. The fellow said it was a random occurrence and didn't know what caused it. He also said it was hard to distinguish scar tissue from real tissue. And Dr B said a lot of heterotopic ossification is linked to TBI which was neat and a mystery I should look into! We also had our meeting with Yi and also the chief of radiology. We all went around the room and explained our week and how things were going. This seemed to be good for some people whose first week wasn't going great.  

I sorted out some issues in scheduling a meeting with my doc and talked to Larry about figuring out this summer. I'll be meeting Dr rodeo earlyyyyy tomorrow morning and I hope it goes well! 

Until next Friday Blog,

Liz