Week 8

This week was similar to previous ones.  I saw patients and attended the usual meetings and seminars.  The other summer student who has been working on the research project with me is presenting our findings as a poster at the National Medical Association Annual Convention.  This week the poster was finalized and presented to some of the doctors involved in the Combined Arthritis Program.  We discussed what should be done next for the project and seem to have a good idea of where the project is going.  The next major step will likely be to create a questionnaire to send to patients to get more details about why they chose to cancel their surgery.  Some major questions we would like them to answer include if they chose to get their surgery at another hospital and what their economic situation is.  There are a couple of research assistants who will be continuing the project but with fewer people working on it, it is likely to progress at a slower pace than it has this summer.  But I'm hopeful that some interesting results will be found that could impact how doctors and the hospital interact with surgical patients to prevent costly cancellations from occurring.
I spent one day this week in the OR with Jacob and Dr. Schneider.  The procedure was an endovascular thoracicabdominal aneurysm repair.  This procedure involved the placement of a graft in the patient's aorta and four stent branches to support the renal arteries, superior mesenteric artery, and celiac artery.  This procedure was done through an Investigational Device Exemption with the FDA and there are only six centers in the country who could have performed such a procedure.  During the procedure, Dr. Schneider regularly checked the blood flow to be sure that everything was placed correctly.  At one point he noticed that there was a leak from the inferior mesenteric artery that was feeding the aneurysm so he inserted several embolism coils into the leaking part of the vessel.  This was a pretty intense procedure, but it was great to observe because I got to see a lot of different techniques used in vascular surgery all in one day.