Week 6 - Shuofei

For clinical experience, I shadowed one flap surgery and two wound cleaning surgeries with Dr. Spector. The patient with flap surgery had a huge hold in her mouse due to tumor removal, and the plan was to harvest a muscle from the wrist to patch up that hole. Two fellows were making incisions on the patient's neck to access the oral cavity while Dr. Spector was harvesting the muscle flap. Then, microsurgery was performed to anastomose the arteries and veins of the muscle slap to that of the neck, and the muscular flap was sutured on top of the hold in the mouth. Meanwhile, a layer of skin was harvested using a dermatome to cover up the wound on the wrist. Overall, I was impressed by how efficiently the medical team worked together to perform multiple parts of the surgeries simultaneously. For the wound cleaning surgeries, one was for the back of a foot and another was for the spinal fusion metal implant. Both patients had serious infections that halted wound healing, therefore Dr. Spector had to cut off the affected tissues, make deep incisions to rinse and aspirate the wound, and implant antibiotic beads in the wound. 

I wrapped up my summer research in Dr. Spector's lab this week. Alicia and I finished optimizing the PCL printing parameter and passed that knowledge to the med student who is going to take over the project. When I go back to Ithaca I will continue working with the Spector lab to facilitates a previous collaboration project between our labs.

It's hard to believe that the immersion has finally come to an end. The past six weeks felt so much longer, and I learned so much more about clinical research and made so many connections.  This experience will definitely benefit my career in the long term.