Anne - Week 5

I spent mornings last week shadowing in the medical ICU. It was a very moving experience and two patients stood out to me. The first was an man in his 40s with liver failure due to his prior alcohol abuse. His legs were extremely swollen and he was fairly confused and didn't really understand what was going on, which the clinicians didn't attribute to alcohol withdrawal. He was ineligible for a liver transplant for a variety of reasons, including that he had a poor history of compliance. The patient would soon have kidney failure and was expected to have fewer than six months to live. While we were on rounds, the doctor broached the subject of dialysis, which the team didn't recommend as it would diminish the patient's quality of life in his remaining days. Sadly, the patient didn't remember the conversation about not being on the liver transplant list anymore and the doctor had to tell him again that he had a very short amount of time left to live.

The second patient was a man also in his mid-40s who had a history of respiratory problems. I didn't catch all of the details of why he was currently in the ICU, but his parents were visiting during the rounds and his father explained that he was a Vietnam War vet who had been exposed to Agent Orange. I remembered learning about this in history class in high school - it was sprayed from planes all over the jungle and villages there. The father really wanted to speak with a person doing research on Agent Orange as he thought his son's health issues could be attributed to it. It was heartbreaking to think that families were still dealing with the effects of this chemical all of these years later.

On a different note, my research project is coming along and I have been making time vs. pixel-intensity graphs for liver lesions for different contrast agents. I'm excited to get analyze them next to each other and see if we can quantitatively predict what a lesion is based on its graph pattern.