Week 4

Week 4. 

It has been passing more than half of this program, which is pretty sad. Even though I repeat same schedule of the week, it always brought up new things to learn. This week, in OR, I firstly saw fluoroscopy. Using contrast agent, we examined the blockage in the patient’s small intestine in real time. Even the technique has been improved a lot, I feel like the successive treatment is still hugely depending on the doctor’s skill. That patient kept experiencing pain in the abdomen so she tried fluoroscopy in other hospital few weeks ago. However, she was failed to get diagnosed at that time since those doctors couldn’t get through the contrast agent at that time. They concluded she had strong resistance from unknown reason so she had to come to hospital again. This time, Dr. Milsom was able to visualize her small intestine from ileostomy pretty easily. We didn’t see any blockage and looks fine. It is hard to say the difference but she could avoid further procedure. Another female patient also had interesting case. She has been cured with radiation for her rectal cancer and it made her female organs fragile. Her vagina has fistula connected to rectum so she was suffered from drainage and pains. This time, doctors carefully examined her vagina, rectum and colons under anesthesia and planned to reconstruct her vagina by skin tubulization and take out her bladder and rectum, and make a new track with colon. It will be a big case but she was so happy that they can reconstruct her diseased organs. It’s gonna happen in this month so I hope I can observe this case. In the research meeting, there was huge conversation about the way of minimally invasive approach for colorectal surgery, which will be my project for summer. I have been watching the research teams and how they develop the photo type of several devices so I will work on how to improve prototype or what can be a better approach with the devices. Next week, I will start background search in the literatures and will collect cases from other countries for comparison.