Week 3 - Leigh Slyker

One of the most interesting cases this week, interestingly enough, was not a plastic surgery. We had a light day in the OR, and had the opportunity to shadow an abdominal aortic aneurysm repair surgery. Prior to a rushed Google search, I had no idea what this surgery consisted of, but seeing that it would be performed under X-Ray, and simply due to its novelty, I was quite excited to see what the procedure entailed. However, due simply to the complexity of the operation, it was difficult to see exactly what was going on. That is, until the device representative walked in...

Bringing with him 30 or so years of experience with vascular grafts, the representative was more enthusiastic in explaining the procedure than any surgeon we had yet encountered. This was possibly due to the fact that he was, unlike the surgeons, merely providing feedback from the sidelines. Still, he was able to explain every part of the surgical process, from how they used reconstructed 3D renderings from CAT scans to figure out the best sizing and placement for the graft, to how the surgeons were able to deploy, adjust and double check the graft.

Perhaps the funniest moment of the whole operation was that after hearing that we were biomedical engineering students, the representative excitedly said something like "oh well then you can ask me all about pore size and wall diameter!"

.. and ask I did, although perhaps not as much as I would have liked.

Unfortunately, I got called up to lab during the middle of the procedure, so I missed the most exciting part of the surgery. When I came back to the OR, the graft was already securely in place, and they were just double checking and closing.

Still, the time spent in lab yielded some albeit incomplete mechanical testing data, which I will have to take as a consolation prize.