This past weekend was my first time experiencing the nightlife and it was nothing short of interesting. Terence, Aaron, Victor, Jason, Mandy, Liz, Lauren and I all went to the Lower East Side to Waffle & Dinges for some delicious savory and sweet waffles. Afterwards, Lauren and I visited one of my friends, Paul, from my undergrad in Harlem where we traveled back to the LES to experience the nightlife. Out of all the excitement, as we were going downstairs in the establishment, I somehow slipped on the stairs and slid down them on my back. I was mortified in the moment and all I could do was laugh. It was a great metaphor of my experience as a PhD student from this first year as well I presume for the rest of my career: If you fall, just laugh and get up. For the rest of the night, it was laughs and good fun. The rest of the weekend entailed hanging out with another one of my friends, Njeri, who attends Cornell Law School, as well as travelling to Brooklyn to get my hair re-twisted. It was gratifying that I was able to wake up at 5:45 in the morning and travel all by myself to another borough of New York. I think I am really starting to get the hang of New York travel life.
On the topic of Immersion, I have been trying to work with radiologists in the Breast Imaging Center on a project. We are trying to get some logistics together, so fingers crossed that the process goes smoothly because I am definitely excited about what I may potentially be working on. On Tuesday, I re-visited the Breast Imaging Center at the hospital site where I was paired with Dr. Janine Katzen and Dr. Maya Hartman to observe needle localizations, which is a procedure that localizes small calcifications or masses that are not palpable for ease of surgery planning and excision. Two types of needle localizations are radiation seed, which can be detected by a Geiger counter which measures the radioactivity to identify the location of the seed in the breast for excision, and guided wire in the breast. It is primarily based on surgeon preference for ease of finding the biopsy clip in the patient where carcinoma or high-risk lesions were previously biopsied and advised to be surgically excised in order to guide the individual patient's care in the future. Two types of wires are used based on surgeon preference (unless a patient has implants. See if you can guess which one is necessary for that particular case): Homer wires, which a needle is left on the outside of the breast, and Kopans wires, which is just the wire is left. Once the radiologists analyze the films in order to determine the least breast tissue to traverse to get to the biopsy clip, they imaging modalities to guide them to the biopsy clip where crosshairs are projected at the clip's location before guiding the needle is fish hooked into the tissue before the patient is sent into the OR.
Through Dr. Katzen's efforts, I was able to follow a patient into the OR to observe Dr. Alexander Swistel. The patient was put on a neo-adjuvant treatment to reduce the size of her masses in the left and right breasts. In order to find some of the specimen, the patient was injected with nuclear medicine and a detector was used which sounded like a synthesizer from an old 70's song (Video embedded for your enjoyment; watch until 1:34). The amount of precision and detail that Dr. Swistel exuded during the procedure was immaculate with excising the tissue to ensure that he got the best possible negative margins, which would be sent to the pathologist to see what kind of future steps for the patient (i.e., radiation, surgery, mastectomy). The specimen that he excised were X-rayed to show both the clip and the wire in order to know that the right area was excised before being other specimen surrounding the area that were cancerous were excised for pathological study. It was apparent how much he cares about his patients because he made sure that the stitches in the patient's breast would not cosmetically affect her breast and leave minimal scarring and absolutely no defect in the breast following surgery because he was trying to save as much breast tissue as he could. Moreover, I could tell that he cared because he told me that he doesn't like to leave the room until the patient is extubated, so that he knows for sure that everything is alright with the patient. It was great to see yet another facet of a breast cancer patient's journey.
Since it is July 4th weekend coming up, I have some friends and my boyfriend visiting for my birthday which is on Monday, July 6th so who knows what will happen this weekend. Stay tuned :)
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