Hey Everyone! I hope everyone is having a great time at their clinical rotations! So Brett and I had the opportunity to speak at a perfusion conference at Lake Tahoe that was organized by Stanford. I gave a case presentation on an adult male who we successfully weaned from ECMO after about 48 hours. He had congenital issues as a kid and had 2 surgeries as a child, then came into Stanford in July for a PVR that went relatively well with few complications. After he was discharged, he was home for about 7 days before coming back into Stanford complaining of SOB. Once admitted, they realized he was hyponatremic (Na+ was 120!) due to aggressive diuresis (he has CHF). So he was in the hospital for another 6 days when they decided to do a pleural effusion, he then arrested. They believe he arrested due to Pulseless Electrical Activity, which I had not heard of before and if you haven't either, google it! It's pretty interesting...the simple way of saying it is that the patient has electrical activity (including an active ECG) but the heart is not contracting (therefore there is no pulse). Anyways, we put him on V-V ECMO that same day, kept him on it for about 48 hours, then weaned him from it. He kept failing his swallowing test, so the biggest issue with him is that he couldn't put on weight, making him extremely weak. Eventually, he was discharged from the hospital about 20 days after he was weaned. He is now back in Hawaii where he is from and really enjoying life! It was such a cool experience following him during his entire stay at the hospital! So that's what I presented at the conference. Brett gave a really interesting presentation on coated tubings, which had a ton of information on it. I'm sure he would love to explain his findings to anyone who wants to hear more about them :)
The other cool thing I did yesterday (which some of you might have saw on my facebook status) was I got to go with the surgeons to harvest the donor organs for a heart-double lung transplant. So we took a private jet to the hospital, and I got to watch the entire surgery of removing the donor organs. It was so cool to see all of the other organs besides the heart and lungs (since we have seen those now multiple times haha)! All of the organs had such vibrant colors, I couldn't believe it. The donor was only 13 (sad story) so the organs were all very healthy. We then flew back and I watched them implant the new heart-double lungs into the recipient. It was so interesting to see the entire process of how organs are harvested, transported, and implanted, so if you guys are given the opportunity to do this, I would definitely recommend it!! It was a LONG day since I had already been in the hospital for a scheduled surgery then went back at 12:20 am that night and finally went home around 3 pm so I was a little sleepy but definitely worth it!!
Anyways, I hope everyone is having a great experience!! I heard the new class is even more talkative than we are haha Hopefully we will be seeing each other again in New Orleans for the AmSECT conference!! Talk to you guys soon :)
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