Week 7: Last week in Surgical Pathology

These seven weeks of immersion have come and gone so quickly! As distant as I am from truly understanding pathology, I was able to get the fundamental ideas, and I loved learning new things every day! This has been an amazing opportunity to experience the clinical world in a very unique way.

When I started, I was completely unfamiliar with pathology, but now I know a lot more. It was great to learn some anatomy, and I enjoyed seeing the process of diagnosis. Everything was new and exciting, but the main take-away was the understanding of how physicians interact and communicate. This immersion program has shown me what is important to physicians, and has provided a different perspective for requirements of good medical innovation. I also had no idea what medical school was like or what residency was until I met the twenty-some pathology residents here, so I gained a better idea of their training and careers as well.

This week (the last week of immersionL), I got to see two more autopsies. I find the whole concept incredible. The pathologists have access to parts of the body that would be extremely difficult to get to if the patient were still alive. An autopsy can make a diagnosis more clear, although I did learn that the cause of death still might not be as clear-cut as they hoped. In reality, autopsy is a fairly long, difficult, and slightly disgusting but extremely valuable process. I’m really glad I got to see a few different cases, but I think that’s all I need on this front. My favorite part of these autopsies was the bone saw. It looks like this:


I thought this was an ingenious piece of technology because it is designed to only cut through bone and not soft tissue, so it prevents accidental incisions of the organs in the body, and it protects the autopsy technician from cuts when he is removing the ribs, spine, or skull. I learned that this is achieved by high-frequency vibrations of the blade so that, when in contact with tissue, the rigid structure of the bone is cut while soft, elastic tissue remains unaffected.
I again attended sign-out sessions, this week only in genitourinary pathology. I have begun to really enjoy these sessions, and I’m a little sad that I won’t have the chance to learn from this expertise anymore. I also learned about hematopathology from a blood smear lecture and went to the gross conference again this week.

This summer immersion program taught me that it is important to understand the whole process in order to truly comprehend how each part fits into the bigger picture. In pathology, each step of preparing tissues affects the next step in the process: grossing affects embedding which affects the cutting and slide formation which can affect the final diagnosis. Each part has to be done properly and documented well to make sure everything is clearly communicated. The clinic is the bigger picture in a lot of the engineering that we do, so recognizing where the requirements originate is vital.

I genuinely loved my time here in surgical pathology. I was completely out of my element, but that made everything much more exciting! I am very grateful to my clinical mentor, Dr. Robinson, and all of the other pathologists, residents, pathologists’ assistants, technologists, and staff for their help this summer (and for answering all of my questions!). It will be sad to leave the hospital, but I guess it’s time to begin grad school!

Rose Buchmann

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