Week 1: Seo-Ho Lee/Dr. Thomas Fahey

For this first week, I spent much of my time shadowing my clinical mentor and his team. My Immersion clinical mentor is Dr. Fahey, a surgeon in Endocrinology who specializes in minimally invasive surgeries. Dr. Fahey is also a collaborator of my PI, Prof. Shuibing Chen, so the project I will be working on involves both labs.

Monday included orientation, meeting with my clinical mentor, and getting set-up in my PI’s lab, which is where I will be conducting research for my Immersion project. On Tuesday, I was able to see a surgery for the first time. Until then, I had only seen surgeries through media, so stepping into the operating room (OR) to see the patient under anesthesia and all of the surgical team working together seamlessly like a well-oiled machine was extremely fascinating and impressive. This first operation was a right hemithyroidectomy to remove a cancerous nodule, along with aspiration and pulsed field ablation of a few smaller nodules. The initial slew of medical terminology was a bit overwhelming, but after listening to the clinicians talk over the next few hours, I was able to understand enough of what they were saying to know what part of the procedure was occurring/what they were referring to.


Other surgeries I saw throughout the week included more hemithyroidectomies and parathyroidectomies to remove parts of the overactive gland. This procedure involved taking blood from the patient before the surgery to get initial parathyroid hormone (PTH) levels and then taking blood from the patient after removing some of the parathyroid glands and sending those vials off to the lab to see if PTH levels dropped to normal levels. It was very cool seeing how quickly the lab and the OR worked together to get specimens and the following analyses all during the duration of the surgery. Perhaps the most exciting part of the week was watching a robot-assisted surgery. I had read about the DaVinci machine in high school, but actually seeing one in person- which takes up a large part of the room- and seeing the surgeon use it was incredible. The ends of the robot arms are tiny, and the surgeon's ability to control their movement remotely clearly took a lot of practice and experience. After nearly an hour, half of a thyroid emerged cleanly from the patient's body.


For Dr. Fahey’s clinic day, I followed him and his team as they met with patients to discuss their health conditions or follow up on treatments. I was very interested in shadowing this component of the clinical schedule, as I am curious about how clinicians communicate information with patients- especially considering the medical jargon I had heard earlier. You could tell that the patients were anxious about their health, but the clinicians explained their conditions slowly and clearly, understanding and answering any questions they had thoroughly and with empathy.


This week has made me much more excited for the weeks to come. I'm looking forward to becoming familiar with all of these procedures to the point where I can explain to others what is happening and getting to see a wider variety of cases.

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