Week 2: Fai

Beside round in the neonatal care which I routinely did it almost every day, this week I saw several new things. In early of the second week I had chances to go to the surgery room. This is the first time in my life to see operations in real. I am very excited about it. I saw surgery to remove thyroid tumor and gallbladder. For the thyroid tumor which is kind of a superficial organ around the neck, surgeons used conventional approach to remove it. In this case the tumor was very big. It was around four times bigger than the normal one. For the gallbladder, they used minimally invasive method which the surgeons made very small incisions on the patient's stomach, and the surgical arms were inserted inside. I also saw plastic surgery—two operations. First is cutting the dead tissue on the diabetic patient’s foot and the second is restoration of the patient’s wound by extending the skins around the wound and sewing them together.

In this week I also attended thyroid tumor conference. There were many challenging case studies in the conference. Doctors and surgeons in the meeting discussed several approaches to find the best method to treat each patient. I gained a lot of information about the ways that patients had been treated not only approaches from the US but also Japan and Europe. After the conference I went to Dr Zarnegar’s group meeting. I got the overall idea about the current research being done in his lab which I found very interesting, greatly useful and, the most important thing, related to my research project that I have be done in Ithaca. I am willing to attend the conference and the lab meeting every week since then.