Today I spent the first part of the day in grand rounds with the department of plastic surgery and I think some other surgeons. The presentations were given by two residents/fellows (I dont know which) and then I sat in on another by one of the professors.

The first was a pre-op presentation about a patient who had fallen on a stair case and fractured his facial bones in a Le Fort type 2 pattern. Nice little diagram:

The resident/fellow described the injuries and the surgical plan as part of the pre-op presentation. Then the professors of the department asked her lots of difficult questions, most of which she didn't know how to answer. It looked quite scary to be in her position. However, one of the doctors complemented her presentation afterwards.

Next a resident/fellow gave a presentation on Hemangiomas and other vascular anomalies of the head and neck. A lot of this presentation was over my head, mostly becasue I didn't know what a hemangioma was until ten minutes ago when I googled it. Anyway, it's a benign tumor of the endothelial cells that line blood vessels. The doctor presented on a bunch of different types. He was also frequently interupted with difficult questions. However, his computer actually crashed before he could finish the presentation.

After that, Dr. Hansen left to do some house keeping, and suggested I stayed for another presentation. All of the other doctors left at this point to because it was for the residents/fellows. The presentation was on how to surgically treat Facial Paralysis. I felt really cool and like I knew what was going on becasue I saw two diseases on one of the slides (Bell's Palsy and Myasthenia Gravis) that I'd actually studied in Aline's bio class. I gave a presentation on Myasthenia Gravis. Anyway, the presentation described a lot of different cases where the Doctor had used different surgical techniques to treat facial paralysis. There were a lot of pictures and they were all pretty amazing results.  

Other than that, we visited a few patients, talked more about breast reconstruction, and I watched a short procedure on a man's foot. He'd actually fallen down 25ft running from the cops and injured his heel. I think by the end of this year I will have been in the majority of the buildings at OHSU. I also did a little bit of research to answer a question Becky Wynne had on one of my other blog posts. You can read her question and my response here: 

www.catlin.edu/blog/bathja/more-studying-of-clinic-life-and-i-still-havent-fainted-in-the-or-the-nurse