Lectures

Today I had lots and lots of lectures. On Thursdays I have lectures all day. The good thing about the lectures is that I get to see friends from school who doing their surgery rotations at different places. There are about 30 of us. So it is a good time to get together and share stories and get caught up. 

Today's lectures were on breasts and pediatric surgery. A pretty well known breast surgeon gave us lecture about breast cancer and the surgical treatments available. I never thought I would say that I would get bored talking about breasts, but never say never. We basically covered all aspects of diagnosing and treating breast pathology. One of the newer concepts is that with certain forms of cancer they administer chemotherapy first and then remove the cancer surgically. They used to head straight to the OR and then do chemotherapy. However, they have found if they can shrink the tumor first it will require less surgery and does not increase mortality of the patient. Another new concept is that they do not recommend self breast exams anymore. Most of the recent data suggests that self breast exams do not decrease breast cancer mortality and in fact increase the amount of unnecessary surgeries. It is still recommended to get regular breast exams done by your physician. Regular mammograms are recommended after 40. 

We also had a lecture series on pediatric surgery. I do not find pediatric surgery very interesting. We basically covered all the common surgeries seen in kids like inguinal hernias, pyloric stenosis, etc. I would have rather been in the OR learning about these with hands on experience. 

Tomorrow we have 5 surgeries, so it is going to be a long day. I am excited and love the OR. The best surgery tomorrow is a neck tumor removal. This tumor is huge, it is almost as big as the patient's head and highly vascularized. There will be lots of blood which means I will get to tie off lots of blood vessels. It should be cool.