Urological Impressions episode 5&6 - The ER strikes back

Hi everyone! This will be the first post of mine that encompasses two weeks that I had missed of blogging specifically the week of Jul 11 and the week after. So much has happened these past two weeks yet so little time to describe it all... but for those of you (you know who you are) that read these posts I will submit my abstract of my experiences.

So one of the more interesting things that occurred was attempting to shadow a clinician in the NYP ER (emergency room) Center located to the right of the hospital's main entrance. Initially when I went on Jul 12th I had no idea which doctor I was supposed to shadow, but after some wrangling I met up with Dr. Jeremy D. Sperling the Assistant Director of Emergency Medicine Residency Program. He gave us an indepth tour of the ER including all the sub-facilities such as the Urgent Care Ward, the Pediatrics Ward, Pysch Ward, the diagnostic triages and even where they store the ambulances. It was a very impassioned tour where Dr. Sperling regaled us stories from the ER and discussed the ramifications of the ER policies (in the ER they are required under law to never turn away a patient even if they don't have insurance or payment). Unfortunately we only got a tour and didn't quite shadow on that day, we tried again a week later but could not find Dr. Sperling.

I also saw some more surgical procedures such as a free fibular flap microvascular jaw reconstruction involving removing a part of the fibula from the leg to form the new portion of the jaw bone being replaced. This patient previously had a jaw reconstruction surgery using his iliac crest (a pelvic area bone) after they removed a mouth tumor but the iliac crest fractured and did not vascularize. So they altered the fibula along with its attached vasculature to form the new jaw, they were also testing a new device that allows them to monitor the blood flow of the vascular anastomosis' post-op. Unfortunately for the excited Dr. Spector (Plastic surgeon) and the company sale rep. the device was malfunctioning but it was interesting nonetheless to see how technology makes its way into the operating room. The jaw reconstruction surgery was headed by two teams of doctors working in tandem: Dr. Spector of Plastic Surgery and Dr. Kutler an Otolaryngologist (Head and Neck doctor). I also saw an adult autopsy with Dr. Khani and Dr. Minick of surgical pathology of a 68 yr old male.

In other news I also had a MRI scan of my brain and attended a Grand Rounds session on the fibrosis of renal transplants by Dr. Thangamani Muthukumar. I also ordered some Sodium Oxalate for my experiments in the lab which arrived on Jul 23rd. Hopefully I can get some real research done before my final week is over and I just noticed that the spacing and font in this post has suddenly changed so....

See you all next week!