Hi Followers!

As a preface, Cardon Children’s Medical Center is split into two different buildings: an office building and a hospital. The office building is where the clinics and the doctors’ offices are located, and the hospital building, as you can guess, is where the operation rooms and the patients being treated are. Once I received my observer’s badge, I was able to start going to the hospital with Dr. Vegunta, my on-site advisor, and his assistant, Jeanne. Dr. Vegunta took me to watch three different surgeries, the first of which was performed to correct a hernia. The second case was an esophagoscopic balloon dilation of esophageal anastomotic stricture with X-ray, which means the surgeon slid a long tube with a camera at the end down the patient’s throat, and then expanded a balloon through the tube to increase the diameter of the esophagus. The esophagus was initially interrupted, but the two segments had been joined in a prior surgery. We had to wear lead aprons during this, because the surgeon would take an X-Ray of the patient occasionally to see the positions of the tube and the balloon in the patient’s body. In the third surgery, which was the longest of the three, Dr. Vegunta removed an abnormal growth in a patient’s leg. All of the surgeries were really interesting to watch, and they showed how much of a team effort a surgery is. There are at least 5 people at work in the operating room, or the OR, during a surgery at all times.

One interesting thing I learned while in the OR is that patients are given 3 different types of anesthesia: one to keep them asleep, one to block any pain signals caused by the surgery, and one to “paralyze” the patient, which simply relaxes all of their muscles. Because of this last anesthesia, patients actually can’t control their eyelids while under anesthesia, so the doctors place tape over their eyes to keep them closed to prevent injury. 

Hey followers!

The first few days of my senior research project have been really interesting. My advisor has rented a laparoscopic simulator and the tools to work in it. The simulator is basically a box with a camera on the inside that feeds video to a monitor that is built into the lid. There are seven holes on the front and sides of the box that the user pushes the shafts of the tools through. By watching the screen, the user is able to see the material that he or she is working on. In addition, my advisor has received an assortment of sutures, some barbed and some smooth. There are dozens of small white boxes, each of which contains sutures of a specific width, length, needle, and texture.

On Tuesday, we met with a representative from Ethicon, a section of Johnson & Johnson that specializes in biomedical devices, and she showed us the types of sutures that the company is working on. She also showed us a device with a plastic handle, a trigger, and a long metal rod with what looked like an open beak at the end. She placed a sheet of plastic in the “mouth” and pulled the trigger. The mouth snapped shut, clamping the sheet in place, and the device made a whirring sound for a few seconds. When the mouth opened again, there was an incision in the plastic, with tiny staples lined around the cut. The representative said these are the kinds of devices that Ethicon makes every year. The kind of work that Ethicon is doing is just what I want to do after college, so it’s a great opportunity to get to work with some of their products.

Hey followers! Chances are you’re looking forward to reading about some interesting research that the BASIS seniors are conducting. So here’s what I’m going to be up to during the third trimester, and what led me to do it

 I have always had an interest in anatomy and biology, because I believe studying how our body works is the first step towards becoming healthier and more able as people. I am particularly intrigued by biology, because the same functions and processes that we learn in class are in effect both within us and around us. The complexity and diversity of biology appeals to me greatly. On another note, I have always been comfortable in math and physics, because, unlike biology, there is always a right answer to a problem. Nearly everything is black and white, and there is not much ambiguity. When I was looking for a site to conduct my research, I wanted to focus on my interest in biology, while maintaining a focus on the engineering aspect of biology.

Like some of my peers, I will be doing my senior research project at a hospital. But unlike most of my classmates, I will be working at Cardon Children’s Medical Center, a children’s hospital in Mesa. During my time there, I will be shadowing pediatric surgeons during their work in the hospital. I will get to go to the operating room and observe surgeries. I think this will be a particularly unique experience, because the challenges presented by pediatric surgery, such as the smaller bodies of children, are significantly different from surgery on adults. On the research side of my internship, I will be focusing on the effectiveness of the sutures used during anastomosis procedures, in which two ends of an intestine are sewn back together. By testing the pediatric surgeons on practice models with both barbed sutures and knotted sutures, I will be able to conclude which type of suture made the surgery easier for the surgeons.