Stopwatch

The clock it ticking as time runs out for Final Presentation Night! It's about time for the biggest day this year!

Weekly Report 5/14/2018 to 5/20/2018

If everything was straight forward, life would be a freelance course without obstacles or stepping stones. However, unfortunately life isn’t the clear pathway we all imagine it to be. The past few weeks have been slightly difficult in terms of compiling my final product. I have been fairly independent in composing the final product due to the lack of time during mentor visits to focus solely on final products. My route initially had been to do a clinical trial which ended up changing into a clinical study due to the difficulties in conducting any sort of “experimentation”. Instead, Dr. Braga has been showing me multiple MRI scans of patients with Chiari and we have been discussing the cases in depth to understand the before and after of the patient’s conditions post-surgery. Over the past few months, it has become much easier to understand MRI and recognize a tumor that is benign versus malignant and a case of chiari or hydrocephalus. With this knowledge and the papers provided by Dr. Braga, I am attempting to create a proposal for a clinical study that can soon be published.

On the other hand, this week I got to watch a unique brain tumor case. The patient had been previously diagnosed with a tumor and had undergone surgery, but unfortunately quite a bit of the tumor had been left behind. The goal of this surgery was to remove the rest of the tumor to keep the tumor cells from possibly spreading. The most common tumor is generally a pilocytic astrocytoma, but in this case it was a Pineal Astrocytic astrocytoma. The tumor was categorized as benign and a low grade (1-2) tumor. The surgery ran fairly long so I had to leave early, thus I was unable to watch the end result of the surgery. However, that is something that can be found out with a follow-up with Dr. Braga.

The next week is fully dedicated to FPN and all the preparations leading up to FPN. The goal is to make additions to my board and begin creating any signs needed for FPN. Invitations have been passed out for a while and the rehearsal speech has been conducted. As we approach FPN, it’s just a matter of getting things done from our lists and getting ready for the big day!