Week 5 - Eeshaan Rehani

This week was more about the research aspect of the summer, and less about the clinical aspect - in fact, I only physically went into the clinic on Friday for a few hours. I was able to sit in on some follow-up nurse visits with patients I had met in the past. It was interesting to go over labs and recent imaging results, and see how that affects their treatment down the line. For the most part, the clinic was extremely slow with many patients out for a short summer break and on 'drug holidays', which has been shown in recent work to aid in the efficacy of treatment and help improve the quality of life.

On the research side, I spent a good amount of time this week planning out my article. After a thorough literature search these past couple weeks, I felt I was in a good position to start pinpointing specific areas within the field of circulating tumor cells and ctDNA in colorectal cancer that would benefit from a review. Specifically, we are focusing on results from clinical advancements that have been made over the past 5 years, with the advent of companies such as Natera and Guardant. I also identified a target journal, which will help inform the structure and flow of the paper.

Unfortunately, due to some scheduling issues, I wasn't able to sit in on the tumor board meeting like we had originally planned. Hopefully next week I'll have better luck. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 8 - Our final week and an ending with watching a major surgery.

 Week 8! This week was our final week of immersion and it was bitter sweat. Looking back, I have learned so many different things and it saddens me to leave the OR and clinic behind. However, I have made new connections with the thoracic surgeon teams. I may even decide to integrate lung cancer into my Ph.D. and expand off of the summer project. This week in the OR was extremely exciting. I saw Dr. Alorki do an Esophagectomy - a major surgery which removes the esophagus. The esophagus runs from the throat, though the chest and into the abdominal cavity, and thus the surgery has three parts to it. The surgery took the entire day and in all probably about 6 hours. First Dr. Altorki made incisions on the chest and used a laparoscopic and minimally invasive approach. The esophagus is located in the mediastinum, this means that he had to first peel off the layers of the mediastinum to get to the esophagus. He detached the esophagus from the surrounding tissue and made sure that the...
Read more

Week 7: The COVID Testing Set-Up

I absolutely cannot believe that we are starting our last week of summer immersion. It has been weird seeing consultation cases, knowing that I will not be able to see their follow-up surgeries. I also enjoyed being able to see summer students visiting from other schools and learn more about how the medical school functions. In the clinic, I saw a former mastectomy patient on their yearly post-op appointment, who was healing well with a little rippling on the breast. Another patient came for a tummy tuck consultation, where I learned that after giving birth people often develop hernias. One of the fibula patients returned for their 2-month post-op appointment and was doing much better, especially with improved speech. They had a wound on their chin that the team worked to clean up and the patient had their lip sutures finally removed. This was the patient who I first saw during my second week here, and it has been remarkable to witness their recovery. Most of the swelling in their to...
Read more

Week 7

 This is Ruoxin. I observed a liver transplantation. The patient got liver cirrhosis where the liver was scarred and permanently damaged. The damaged liver was taken out of the patient while the fresh liver from donor was being processed. All the main veins of the donor liver would be tied up with threads, which were non-degradable, before being connected to the main veins of the patient's body. The whole process took over 6 hours. This experience was so amazing and meaningful. 
Read more