Friday, June 18, 2010

Vascular Surgery Experience Week 1--Weiwei

This week, I observed four surgeries with Dr. Karwowski. One of them is the open surgery and the other three are minimal-invasive surgeries. The open surgery is an intense one, lasted for eight hours on Friday from 9:00am to 5:00pm. The patient has clottings all the way from left groin artery to the knee. The surgery is to take off the vein in the same leg, set it as a bypass, reverse the direction and replace the clotting artery. Among the three minimal-invasive surgeries, two of them were using angioplasty to open up the plaques to recover the blood circulation, the other one is to place a filter in the vein to capture and dissect the thrombus coming from the leg to prevent the thrombus from going to the heart and causes stroke.

I also visited about 30 patients with Dr. Karwowski on Wednesday. Most of the patients have blood circulation problems in the lower legs, with arteries clotted for various reasons. The symptoms are usually swelling on the lower legs and feet, with ulcers around the feet.

On the Wednesday afternoon, I also attended a study section for new coming fellows and residences in vascular surgery. Dr. Henry Bush taught us the basic principles in diagnoses of vascular diseases, for example, how to use stethoscope to get the basic information (flow rate, flow velocity) of the blood flow in the artery.

No comments:

Post a Comment