Week Five: Stone Shake

Another week of being immersed has come to a close and plenty has happened on the research front. A large chunk of my research involves coding and reading specific files. This week I learned a huge lesson for this process as I thought I had finished my function and it would be functional for all the files. However, I did not account for the potential that different versions of the same file existed let alone versions with drastically different data structures. This led to my entire MatLAB script erroring out and halting the progress I made. Luckily, this happened towards the beginning of the week giving me time to get it back up and running, and now it has been fixed and progress can be made as I set the parameters to be gathered.

Outside of the research realm, this week I had an opportunity to see a transurethral kidney stone removal. In the grand scheme of most procedures it is not the most exciting, but what caught my attention was the similarities of the ureteroscope controls to a videogame. What probably made it seem that way was the button smashing done on the scope that mirrored that done on videogames like Super Smash Bros. for any Nintendo system. It also helped that they were shooting a laser to help break apart the kidney stone so that added to the whole videogame vibe. Besides the videogame vibe, it was interesting to see how the procedure was done. The use of an inserted wire helped give a frame of reference the surgeon could use to navigate the tubes within the kidney to the kidney stone was not something I expected to be used while removing the stone.


Beyond the hospital, this week I spent some time some of the food options nearby such as Black Tap, which has some amazing shakes and a great bison burger. The shake I got was a sweet and salty shake that had peanut butter cups, M&Ms, pretzel sticks, fudge, and whipped cream. It is what I want in a shake except for the price, but it was totally worth it still. Unlike last week, I had more opportunities to explore other coffee shops, but none can dethrone Gregory’s as my go to place for coffee. Maybe there will be something better next week or when I go to the Bronx for a soccer game. 

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