Week 4 07/12/21

 Week 4

Going into week 4 of the summer immersion program, I have become more familiar with the Interventional Radiology (IR) department, which is my "home base". This week, my mentor, Dr. Bradley Pua, introduced me to his colleagues and collaborators who work in other departments to observe their surgeries.

On Monday, I spent the day with Dr. Timothy McClure, who is a faculty at both the IR and urology department. Dr. McClure specializes in prostate and kidney diseases. I was able to shadow his tumour ablation procedures in previous weeks and on Monday I got to see him conducting a procedure called lithotripsy -- which is a minimally invasive method to treat kidney stones by physically fragmenting the stones using ultrasonic energy or shock waves under the guidance of an endoscope. Tuesday I was shadowing Dr. Milsom, who is a world-renowned colorectal surgeon, for his colonoscopy and laparoscopic surgeries. One of his patients had a condition called volvulus, which is when a part of the intestine twists on itself and causes bowel obstruction and intense abdominal pain. To treat this patient, the surgeons first used laparoscopy to identify the region of the twisting, they then made an open incision to retrieve this part of the intestine, dissected the twisted region, and connected the intestine again via suture. Although there are other options to un-twist the intestine, dissection proves to be the most effective at preventing re-occurence.  

In the next few days, I returned to the IR department, and observed other procedures, including knee embolization, TIPS revision, IVC filter retrieval, and many more. I did also spend an afternoon in the neurosurgery department with our classmate Austin and his mentor, Dr. Schwartz. There was a patient undergoing craniotomy to remove part of the patient's temporal cortex and hippocampus to relieve the symptoms of severe epilepsy.