Faith Muriuki - Dr. Spector

 7/15/2024 - 7/19/2024

The week started with clinicals. One of the patients had a skin graft. I had watched the operation where the patient received their skin graft. The patient was seeing Dr. Spector for their weekly post-surgery follow-up. The patient came in concerned that their skin graft had gotten infected because of how bad it looked. When Dr. Spector checked the graft, he explained that its condition was due to the accumulation of scabs. The graft was in an area that was difficult to clean and had likely not been properly cleaned since the surgery. We also visited a patient in the SICU. This patient had undergone major surgery that required collaboration among multiple surgical teams. While visiting, we saw the result of Dr. Spector's involvement. The patient had a huge flap attached to their body. Dr. Spector explained that the flap would naturally decrease in size over time and would not remain as bulky as it currently was. This was my first time seeing a patient initially in the clinic, then in the OR, and finally recovering in the SICU. Another patient we saw was a liver transplant patient. This patient's surgery involved a huge surgical incision across the chest. When they came in for a checkup, their surgical wound had healed nicely. The patient hadn't seen their wound since it was initially wrapped, so they were surprised at how well it was healing. It was also cool to see the liver transplant patient walking and not attached to tubes, as I had only seen them bedridden in the SICU or unconscious in the OR.

I also did lab work this week. I fixed my collagen samples from last week and transferred them into histology cassettes. Yesterday, I personally embedded my samples. It was really cool because, although I have worked in a histology lab before, that lab outsourced their embedding process. Since this was my first time doing it, there was some difficulty, but in the end, all my samples were embedded. After embedding, the samples were sliced. Unfortunately, I couldn't do that myself as it required special training I didn't have, so a researcher in Dr. Spector's lab did it for me, which I greatly appreciated. I got two slices per sample, and I had three samples, making six slides in total. Today, I am going to do H&E staining on my samples.

I also went to the OR this week. One notable case involved a patient who had done something that resulted in the forcible opening of their flap, so Dr. Spector had to come in and salvage the damage. I imagine ripping open a flap must have been extremely painful for the patient. Fortunately, the resulting surgery was relatively short.