Week 3 - Erica Wagner

During my third week of clinical immersion, I continued shadowing Dr. Chandwani for in patient rounds where we visited patients both pre- and post-surgery. This time I was able to focus more on the patient interactions and the team caring for each patient. I found it interesting that there was a social worker on the team who helped with setting up payment plans and ensured patients would be returning to a safe environment to continue healing. There were also other minor details that I noticed that stressed how much the clinicians at Weill Cornell value the all-around care of the patient, more than simply completing the surgery and then sending them home. The team would not release a patient until they could easily climb up four flights of stairs since they lived in a 4th floor apartment. Another patient was able to pick their day of release as one option coincided with their religious holiday. For another patient, they taught the spouse how to unpack and repack the wound site so that no at home nurse would be required since this was not covered by their insurance. While these might seem like small actions, it really emphasized the patient care to me. Patients were not treated like another case, they were viewed and cared for as individuals with a personalized treatment plan for each.

In Dr. Chen’s lab, I have started a total of 4 beta cell differentiation (one each time I split cells). I am also nearly finished sectioning the COVID infected pancreatic islets and will then move onto immunostaining these samples and sectioning lung organoids. Another project that I am starting is characterization of cerebral organoids of knockout and wildtype stem cell lines. This project is to understand the role of circadian rhythm genes on the development of cerebral organoids. I am looking forward to imaging the samples I have been prepping by the end of next week.

In my free time, I visited The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island. The MET was much bigger than I expected so I spent most of my time at the Roman, Greek, and Egypt exhibits. The Statue of Liberty was amazing to see in person and I bought way too many souvenirs at the islands. I also enjoyed the fireworks on July 4th at FDR drive.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 1

For my first week of immersion I attended the OR's of a few different physicians as my clinical mentor Dr. Jason Spector of plastic surgery and reconstruction was on vacation this week. I was able to see three different hernia repairs, and one double mastectomy and bilateral DIEP flap.  I think my favorite thing I saw was the double mastectomy and bilateral DIEP flap. From what I understand, this is a procedure in which both breasts were removed and fat from the stomach is used to reconstruct the breasts. The novelty of the DIEP flap is that it does not require the removal of muscle which allows patients to recover quicker. Additionally, blood vessels from the fat in the stomach are left in tact and "hooked up" to corresponding vessels in the breast. All in all, the procedure essentially amounted to a breast reconstruction and tummy tuck. It was a 10 hour surgery that required multiple doctors and departments, as this was not just a purely cosmetic procedure- the patient ...
Read more

Week 1 - Samantha Bratcher

Image
Hi, everyone! My name is Samantha Bratcher. My clinical immersion is with Dr. Adam Talenfeld and Dr. Kyungmouk Steve Lee in the Interventional Radiology (IR) department. Although it's not very related to my field at the university (biomechanics/mechanobiology), the clinical experience has still been very interesting. The IR department is super friendly and all the clinicians have been very available to letting me shadow them. It's only been one week, but I've already learned a lot! Every day has been watching something new, from angioplasty to biopsy to embolization. I find it so crazy that they're able to thread a wire through someone's veins to practically any area of the body. It's always a bit crazy to watch. I got a video of a balloon angioplasty using this method. The balloon is inflated inside a person's veins to expand them and increase blood flow. The second video shows the veins and their quality. The rate at which the contrast dye flows through is...
Read more

Week One - Shenghao Tan

I am working with Dr. Mirella Salvatore from the infectious disease division. My research project will revolve around associations of COVID 19 patient clinical characteristics with their hostresponses throughout their hospitalization and recovery.   On the patient care side I have been following Dr. Ole Vielemeyer in ID consultation. A large part of the round is to discuss the choice of antibiotics, itsdosage and duration from lab results and examination reports. Some of the cases this week have been quite complicated and chronic; therefore, joint effort were required to provide adequate treatments. One patient had to battle both Crohn's disease and histoplasmosis, where the immunosuppressant and antibiotics used must be carefully considered to treat the histoplasma and maintain some immune system function, while not severing the GI tract. A part of medical care I learned that I haven't considered much of is the inpatient - outpatient transition: how is the treatments adjusted ...
Read more