Week 1: Discovering lymphedema and clinical importance
Though I have passed through New York City as a tourist or overnight visitor on many occasions, never would I have imagined that I would have the honor of sojourning in the medical epicenter of the city, surrounded by the very patients and clinicians I engineer and tinker for in lab. Fortuitously enough, my clinical mentor Dr. Babak Mehrara, the Chair of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, happens to specialize in the niche area where my lab at home in Ithaca has expertise, the lymphatic system, in the even more overlooked procedure of breast reconstruction for the associated cancer. I was introduced to Dr. Mehrara via a developing collaboration with my graduate mentor, Dr. Esak Lee, due to our shared interests in lymphatics, but had relatively little knowledge arriving here concerning the surgical procedures of breast reconstruction and lymphedema treatment, much less the connection between the two. After meeting the members of my c...