Week 1 - Justin Levine

 This week was an introduction to immersion, and I spent time getting to know the hospital, familiarizing myself with the lab I will be working in, and beginning to shadow surgeries. I am working with Dr. Jason Spector, the chief of plastic surgery, this summer, and although only a week in I have already been exposed to a huge amount of new information and experiences.


In the lab, Pooja (my co-mentee) and I were onboarded by Dr. Xue Dong, the lab’s main research associate. Dr. Dong introduced us to the lab’s novel biomimetic matrix platform for modeling breast cancer in vitro, which I found incredibly interesting, as my personal research project is focused on better characterizing breast cancer bone metastasis. My lab also uses the same primary human breast cancer organoids that the Spector lab is preparing to introduce to their system, so I spent some time getting information and protocols from my lab that I could share with Dr. Dong and her labmates. I was pleasantly surprised to see the extent of how related my lab’s research is to Dr. Spector’s group’s, and a major goal of mine for this summer is to form a lasting connection that encourages future collaboration between our groups.


Outside of the lab, I had my first experiences in the clinic and the operating room. I have never worked in a medical setting, so this was all completely new to me, and I truly enjoyed getting to learn about the medical field through direct engagement and shadowing. We spent a day accompanying Dr. Spector’s PA, Kristen, on her clinical work, all checkups one to three weeks post-operation. I was able to talk with patients and see them on the road to recovery, and also see what the results of successful reconstructive surgeries look like. It amazed me how well Dr. Spector and his team are able to improve patients’ quality of life even in the face of truly drastic traumas, including total jaw replacement and degloving of appendages.


Where the clinic showed me the longer-term outcomes of successful plastic surgery, my shadowing in the OR provided a glimpse into how those outcomes are produced. I will go into more detail on other procedures, including breast reconstruction and skin grafts, in a subsequent post, but the highlight of the week was a hand reconstruction. A patient with cancer had an issue with the chemotherapy port in her right hand leading to buildup of chemotherapy in the hand and large-scale tissue necrosis. Dr. Spector and his team, over the course of just three hours, repaired this wound with a skin flap taken from the patient’s arm, reconnecting blood vessels with microsurgery and repairing the area from which the skin flap was harvested with Dr. Spector’s DermiSphere dermal regeneration template. I had previously attended a talk about DermiSphere, and it was exciting to see it used in the OR. I really appreciated seeing the different teams, plastic surgery, anesthesiology, and nursing, all work together to quickly repair a large and painful wound and so drastically improve the patient’s quality of life. I am incredibly grateful to have had such an interesting and inspiring introduction to the medical field, and I am excited to continue my immersion experience this summer.


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