Plastics Week 3 - Lindsey

 This was a two day week for me, as I spent the later half of the week back in Ithaca teaching high school juniors and seniors about my project, embryology, and the principles of biomedical engineering. The students were visiting Cornell as a part of 4H Career Explorations.  They were very excited to learn all that we had to teach them and it was refreshing to have them in the lab.

The days I spent in the city were a little less hectic than usual. Monday was an office hour day and Tuesday there was only on low key surgery, the closing up of a leg wound an elderly woman had sustained. Since there wasn’t much going on in this surgery I was able to watch how they obtained and place the skin graft. They carefully measured the area on her thigh and excised the skin. The RN then ran the skin flap through a hand device that consisted of a wheel and cheese grader type mesh to give the skin its mesh appearance that allows it to vent and receive blood and oxygen from the muscle directly underneath it.  

I enjoy seeing patients that were once on the table unconscious and covered in a dehumanized manner,   come in for their follow up visits or sitting up and talking to the Doctor in rounds. They look so different and the woman often 1,000 times more glamorous when they come into the office.  I am now privy to most of details concerning the follow up patients’ cases  because I was actually there, which is a cool feeling. We rounded on my favorite patient from last week, the tumor patient whose jaw was reconstructed, and her jaw was wired shut, her face rather swollen, but she was so positive and used a dry erase board to communicate.  She won’t be able to talk for another week at least.

I attended one of the monthly morbidity and mortality conferences Monday evening. Residents would present the case and then the attending and sometimes other residents ask questions about what could have been done differently, etc.  Some questions were very accusatory and not asked very politely. The attending on the case generally wasn’t mentioned in the presentation and the attending would later speak up to say it was their case and justify their actions if they thought it necessary.  It was a very interesting dynamic and I’m glad I was able to attend. One of my favorite comments was uttered quietly from the young surgeon next to me, after the presentation of one of Spector’s jaw tumor cases.  “ Wow. Makes me want to be a surgeon…oh wait, I am.” I thought it was really funny because I was just thinking how the technology, which allowed for such creativity, was the coolest part of the case and it made me want to me a biomedical engineer. Oh wait, I am.