New Experiences

Last week I got to see deep brain stimulation surgery. I wanted to see as much as possible because I am supposed to be implanting DBS electrodes in rats for my thesis. Of course I tried so hard to see everything that I kept touching the blue sterile surface. The guy got kind of annoyed with me and I felt stupid and useless. My clinician also was telling me that I was getting too close. It is a very serious surgery, so I understood that I need to stay back to some extent. Nonetheless, it was fascinating. They used a lot of trial and error to find the right position and voltage of the electrode to maximize benefit for the treatment of Parkinsonian symptoms without interfering with motor control. They kept asking the guy to speak the days of the week. Sometimes it was muffled, sometimes it wasn't. I guess it varied depending on the positioning of the electrode. They also told him to flex his feet and open/close his hand. The surgery lasted for several hours.

The next day I saw three plastic surgeries. These surgeons were sooo much less serious. They played music, joked around, and the head surgeon played peek-a-boo behind the door. In the first two surgeries there was a lot of manipulation of the skin. In one, the skin would be stretched over time, then excess skin would be used to replace scar tissue. In the other surgery, the woman needed a skin graft. I could see all the exposed muscle that they were covering up. She also had the biggest blister on her heel that I had ever seen. It looked like a giant diabetic blister or something.

Today I saw open heart surgery. They are right, it is intense. They bypassed the heart and lungs so that they could treat an aortic valve inefficiency. The blood went to a machine that acted as a heart. The resident said they would take a blood vessel from the leg and use it to replace one of the aortic vessels. It did not see the whole thing because I had other things to do.

I really want to learn as much about stereotactic surgical techniques from my clinician as possible, specifically on dissecting rats. He had me hook up with a woman in his lab who plans on doing stereotactic surgery. She said she had never done stereotactic surgery either. Not too encouraging. On the other hand, Yi stated clearly that this work is not meant to be for our theses.

I continued to work on the research protocol that Dr.Frayer says is junk. I was too lazy to change what I was doing and figured that at least I am learning a lot about neuroanatomy, something that is important to me in pursuing a neural engineering career. Now that I have learned about the neuroanatomy of drug addiction, I think about the reward circuit when I pop in snack foods and go out for a run. I have finished writing about the rationale now, so I don't know what he will have me do next.