Perry Katsarakes / Dr. Rohit Chandwani - Week 2

 This week I was able to meet with my mentor, Dr. Chandwani, for the first time! We discussed our mutual research interests as well as what I hoped to get out of this partnership, and were able to set up my attendance at many exciting experiences for this week and the rest of the summer, the first of which was observing appointments at his clinic.

At Dr. Chandwani's clinic, I spent the day going with him to various appointments he had with pancreatic cancer patients. These ranged from visits with patients who had just undergone surgery, to patients who were being diagnosed for the first time, to patients who were finishing the recovery process and preparing to return to normal life. It was amazing and eye-opening to be on the other side of a medical appointment for the first time. I'm no stranger to sitting in a doctor's office as they read through my files, run tests, and provide me with information and diagnoses, so it was fascinating to be given the opportunity to see all those files myself and gain a deeper understanding of what kind of information that doctors (and specifically oncologists) have to work with.

It was so impressive to see Dr. Chandwani casually scroll through dozens of CT scan images and point out the tiniest differences from scans taken at earlier times. While I could barely make out which organs were which, he was able to notice changes on the scale of a single millimeter, identifying tiny pockets of tissue that were growing very slowly and could potentially be cancerous. His expertise was inspiring and undoubtedly resulted from many years of thorough practice and study, which has given me all the more motivation to pay close attention during this amazing experience and soak up as much knowledge as I can.

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