Miles+M

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=A Day in the Life of an Eye Surgeon=

Goals:
My goals for this project were to learn about how a healthy human eye operates, how your eye can become damaged, and how to restore vision to a damaged eye. As well as learning about the eye, I was also interested in how the doctor talks and calms the patients before the surgery, what happens in the surgery room, from scrubbing yourself down, to talk amongst the doctors, and actually having the vantage point of a surgeon rather than from the patient’s perspective for once.

==Discoveries: == Shadowing Doctor Roh for the day accomplished many of my goals. I learned the intricate processes of how a surgeon restores vision into a damaged human eye. Also I now understand how a doctor talks to a patient pre-surgery, during surgery, and post-surgery, calmly, intelligently, and friendly. I also noticed that doctors talk to each other in the operating room like they would outside in a social event with intermittent discussions of asking for tools, opinions, and help. I was taught how to scrub down, you wash down from your hands to your elbows scrubbing everything 10 times with a sponge and you hold your hands up in the air making sure to touch nothing until you put your surgery gown on. Maybe the most important thing I learned that day was the point of view of the surgeons. Looking through the microscope at the person’s eye was amazing and instead of feeling nervous about screwing up one feels confident and good that you are about to change someone’s life for the better forever.

Challenges:
The most challenging part of this project was observing the first surgery; below is a brief description of the events of the first surgery. A metal clamp held up the tarp and Mrs. X’s eyelids from shutting. This had effect on Mrs. X’s eye that made it seem to pop out of her head, this was frightening. After this was done I watched Doctor Roh slowly pierce the cornea of the eye with a knife. At first I had to hold back my shrieks so I wouldn’t scare the patient, but eventually I got used to the continual stabbing of the eye. After Doctor Roh had created an incision on the eye, she brought up the defective lens into the pupil. The useless lens looked like someone had messed up on a stain-glass window. Then Doctor Roh broke the lens into little pieces, so that it make it much more easier to suck up with a tiny vacuum. Finally she put in the man made synthetic lens into the eye and positioned it perfectly back into the eye. This all happened while her assistant continuously squirted some type of liquid in the patient’s eye.



Looking Back:
The only way I can think about improving this experience would be to have started earlier. If I had started earlier I believe that I would have been able to get this project done sooner, but even starting it now I have no regrets.



Project Resources:
http://www.najafimd.com/images/pic_anatomay.jpg http://www.99main.com/~charlief/Blindness.htm http://www.pasadenaeye.com/