Week1: Immerse myself to real field

Week 1

On Monday, I first met with my clinician mentor, Dr. Milsom, who is well  known for a colorectal surgeon. In the meeting, he briefly introduced his general schedule for a week and then a research group who’s developing a minimally invasive device for colorectal surgery. As his regular schedule, I was seeing patients all day with him. Most of the patients came for follow-up after their surgeries and it was thankful that he could tell them everything seemed looking good and healed well. Most of his patients were old, got a surgery that removed part of their digestive system but still doing well. There was one patient who’s waiting for chemotherapy and she was quite upset and nervous about that. I was highly impressed that Dr. Milsom could relieve her worries and concern with only honest. He was assuring the patient that it will be tough but no one will give up on her. It was pretty touching moment so hard to calm down myself. He was seeing patients all day long without break and he was fully focused on each patient when he was with them. On day 2, I was in the OR and observed quite diverse operations. Most of the them had severe inflammation along with their digestive system and he removed a bad piece of colon, rectum or both. Not much procedures were done in small intestine which makes me think most frequent diseases start in colon. The interesting part of the surgery was this: since they removed part of gut, how they could re-connect it? He used  a medical device. It has two separate parts which can assemble tightly by clicking. He placed one part at the margin of incised tissue and then the other part is going through the bottom area so that those two part can be connected like button on your shirt while making incision on the adhering part so that it can have one piece of lumen. I am not sure I described it clearly but it was pretty amazing that they can make two separate piece to one functional lumen like as it was only with simple medical device. After he reconnect it, he needed to make outlet from the end of the small intestine to outside to remove stools since those new lumen will not be functioning until everything is well healed up. So they made a hole on upper abdomen, called ileostomy, and then added a pouch. The most big case on that day was the last one which started around 11 pm. That patient was diagnosed to colon cancer and had been treated with radiation and chemotherapy. The surgery was to complete her long way to cure cancer and he was planning to remove part of the colon which still had tumor. He had to remove from sigmoidal colon to rectum and when he looked at the specimen, the tumor was so close to the end of the incision. Therefore, he took some tissues from both end of the incision to make sure there is no tumor left on her body and then sent it to pathologist around 1 am. Because it was urgent, we could get a result in an hour and thankfully, both ends were all negative. It was quite thrilling moment that everyone in OR was so glad and he had high five with his fellows (of course only with sterile gloves) and then he could wrap up the last case by doing ileostomy. It was pretty long day but I was so grateful that every surgeries went successfully. I also examined removed tissues which had different pathological conditions. I personally highly interested in fundamental questions which, as Dr. Milsom said, could not help any of patient. When we had a conversation in-between cases, he was really eager to show me his engineering project not just because I am from engineering field, but also he thinks engineering is the best way to help and treat patients. The first week of immersion makes me think lots of different things. I would pursue my thesis to answer unsolved biological questions in specific disease of my interest but then now I start to think how that could contribute to real world, which should be the purpose that researches look for. I can’t wait to have my second week of immersion.