Last week was fun. Monday started
out with a lecture by Dr. Carol on Pediatric ocular tumors. I found the lecture to be very informative since it was geared as an “intro to” type
lecture for the pre-residency program and was therefore fairly easy to
understand.
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| Just a typical Monday morning lecture given by Dr. Carol Shields |
Clinic for new patients progressed as usual and we saw a patient
who came in from Columbia with a massive extra-orbital extension. Since the
tumor was so large, it was suggested that the patient might need an orbital
exenteration. We also saw a patient with a large ring melanoma (which is
extremely rare), and suggested that the patient have the eye enucleated. That
night, the family that I am staying with had one of the doctors over for
dinner, Dr. Feldman (in the Cornea Service). To my great surprise, one of the
med-students who I work with in the clinic was also invited. No one had prior
knowledge that either of us worked together. That was quite an exciting dinner.
Tuesday
began with seeing CHRPE (congenital hypertrophy of the retinal pigment epithelium)
and a regressed form of Coat’s disease, nothing completely out of the ordinary
to see at such a clinic. We saw a
patient that came in and was so touched by all the kids crying last time she
came that she decided to do something with her friends; she came in that day
with a bag full of hand knit animal friends to give to the kids and comfort them
while being examined. She plans to make more animals with her knitting club and
send them in, and also license out the designs and donate the profits to ocular
tumor research. It was probably one of the most touching things that I have
seen in a very long time. Lunch that day was provided by the hospital in honor
of their 2nd place national ranking for hospitals specializing in
ocular care. They ordered about 100 pizzas for the hospital staff and gave them
out for free to everyone. Who knew hospitals threw such awesome pizza parties?Afterwards I returned to my research on the PLSU (partial lamellar sclerouvectomy) report.
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| Free Pizza!! |
Wednesday
we went into the OR for more EUAs and saw another case of Coat’s disease and a
case of cavitary retinoblastoma (which is extremely rare to see and is easily
misdiagnosed and mistreated)
Thursday
was an intense day. I started out in the OR with Dr. Jerry seeing the usual
removal of conjunctival lesion. I then went to two pre-residency lectures by
Dr. Alex Levin (head of the Pediatric department at WillsEye). The first was on
ocular genetics which was quite good and interesting and made me think about
the things that I see in a different light. The second was on the
manifestations of child abuse in pediatric ophthalmology and was equally as
good as the first. I then went back to surgeries to watch an orbital lymphoma excision
(which was promptly brought up to pathology to look at under microscope).
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| The Pathology Department's 15 headed microscope that took up an entire room |
We saw not
one, not two, but three enucleations that day. One of them was the ring melanoma that we saw earlier in the week. Dr. Carol was quite excited about this enucleation since the patient had prefect OCT (
Friday I was invited back to the pathology department to see Dr. Eagle cut up the enucleated eyes from the previous day. I got to witness the anatomy of the eye first hand under the microscope and see all the deformities cause by the tumors and other points of interest rarely talked about in textbooks. The accumulative time spent in the lab this summer amounts to 4 hours, those 4 hours in the pathology lab. I came home on Friday smelling like formaldehyde but it was worth it to see such a nice lab with such a great view.
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| Dr. Eagle in the background |
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