Week 3 - Jon Albo

It's really exciting and rewarding watching patients get treatments that they've been waiting weeks, months, and years for. I spent all of this week shadowing inpatient and outpatient clinics for stem cell transplants. In the inpatient clinic, I shadowed Dr. Mayer and the PA's and got to meet and follow a bunch of patients at different stages. I watched three patients this week get their stem cell transplants - two were haplocord transplants and one was an allogenic CAR-T cell transplant for a clinical trial! All the patients have been doing great and haven't shown any signs of graft versus host disease yet which is super awesome.

In the outpatient clinic, I've been shadowing Dr. van Besien who is incredible at explaining things to me and catching me up for each and every patient. Before we see each patient, we sit down for around 10 minutes and discuss the patient's stage, potential treatments, and any potential issues that they might have. Unlike when I was shadowing in lymphoma where most of the patients were cured and just coming in for checkups, most of the patients we see in stem cell transplants are getting ready for treatment or are not too far after treatment. I was able to watch a bone marrow biopsy for a patient that is being evaluated to be involved in a clinical trial which was interesting to see. They don't do bone marrow transplants very often anymore because of the difficulty and increased pain associated with it, but for this patient they needed to take a biopsy to determine if he would be eligible for the trial. Next week a few of the patients we've been seeing in outpatient will be coming to inpatient to start receiving their treatments so it will be super cool to see everything full circle!

Additionally this week, a couple of Dr. Wang's post docs taught a few of us about MRI and scanned our brains! I haven't received my brain scans yet but here's a picture of the MRI machine we learned about and were able to watch the post-docs operate.