This week was limited in clinical experiences due to the Joint Commission, but I was still able to go to cardiothoracic surgery on Monday. Unfortunately, it was not the most educational experience, due mostly to the staff in the surgery. They were very unhelpful and did not want to take time to explain anything. Even now, I am not exactly sure what surgery I saw. I believe they were replacing the aortic arch with a synthetic graft. There was a medical student who was very nice and tried to explain what she knew, but she was a first year and did not have in depth knowledge of the procedure either. A couple things I picked up on were that the patient was being kept very cold, even so far as to place ice packs over her head. They were also using a heart bypass machine, obviously, to be able to perform the surgery. I was able to see things pretty closely by standing in the anesthesiologist’s area, next to the patient’s head. But again, it was hard to make sense of what was going on without any guidance.
I ran another quality control plate to determine the ideal annealing temperature for the primer for Wnt5a. This analysis went well, with very reproducible melting curves and my analysis determined that the ideal annealing temperature for Wnt5a is 58.5C.
I also led a journal club discussion for a joint bone journal club that is held between Cornell and Hospital for Special Surgery each month. I chose a particularly challenging article for myself, with a vast amount of Western blot data. The discussion went well, and relates to some of the future research that I will likely do in Ithaca relating to the role of the estrogen receptor alpha in the bone adaptive response to load.
Although this is the last official week for the immersion term, I will be here one extra week due to my two-week trip to Australia – so next week will be full of clinical experiences at New York Presbyterian – each day I hope to see a new clinical department!
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