Week 5 - Emily

This week was the most clinical of my time here. I was able to go on rounds with the pediatric cardiology team twice and observe diagnostic echocardiograms for an entire afternoon. The ECG tech was an excellent teacher, walking me through why they do each step of the imaging, what views she needed, and the feedback she usually gets from the doctor. For some reason, every patient we saw that afternoon was a young girl being evaluated for Marfan's syndrome, a disease of the connective tissue. Along with genetic screening, ECG is a good way to evaluate the presence and/or stage of Marfan's syndrome in a patient, due to a characteristic swelling of the aortic root that increases with increasing severity of the disease. One of the three girls had confirmed Marfan's, so I was able to directly compare the diameter of her aorta with the patients who tested negative.

Rounds are becoming more and more interesting as I learn to decipher the acronyms, codes, and machine read-outs, in addition to getting to know the style of each attending and fellow. The doctors are quite different in not only their bedside manner, but also how they approach pediatric medicine. Obviously, they get very little patient feedback and have near perfect compliance with their treatment prescriptions. This makes their job quite different from an adult's physician, whose largest struggle is often convincing a patient of the usefulness of their treatment.

Lab was unexpectedly slow this week, but for a good reason. My post-doc mentor had a death in the family, so I was able to move forward with my project only incrementally. However, in my free time I learned some pretty nifty procedures, including how to implant breast cancer cells directly into the mammary gland of a live mouse without confounding the study with unnecessary surgical inflammation or injury. I also learned to isolate lung cells, and more about how a "Cancer Lab" works through reviewing a paper with them and hearing lab meeting presentations from our collaborators in the MSKCC.