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Day 7, 8, and 9

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     For the seventh and eighth days of my J-Term, I mainly spent my time working on my final research paper and using survival analysis to analyze the data I was being shown.      I started by first learning what the patient data exactly showed us. It showed us how dialysis affected the survival of liver transplant patients with Pulmonary hypertension. The results of this data really fascinated me and shocked me, since this was something I never learned about before.      After looking at the data and learning about the liver transplant patient survival, we then looked at the same data in comparison to those who didn’t have Pulmonary hypertension or undergo dialysis. This also really interested me, since I didn’t know that the survival of both groups of patients would be so similar to each other.        For the last and ninth day of my J-Term, I spent the day working on the data which I am going to include in my final project for this Independent J-Term: my final research paper.     
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Day 4, 5 and 6: The Liver and the Right Heart

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       For the fourth and fifth days of my J-Term, I started to learn more about the different ways to analyze patient data. One way I learned about was through a video about the Kaplan Meier Model, which turned out to be less complicated than I initially thought.  Through watching the video, I was able to learn that the Kaplan Meier Model is a way of survival analysis, and how it’s used to measure the survival of patients. This was something that I’d never heard of before, so it definitely interested me and it was really fascinating. Throughout both days, I also took time to work on my final research paper with Dr. Wasim Dar. My final research paper is about How dialysis affects right heart failure in liver transplant patients.   For the sixth day of my J-Term, we did some activities outside, mostly at the Health Museum. In the morning, we drove to the Health Museum and began by looking at the beating heart. I learned the basic anatomy of the heart, as well as how the right at
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Day 3: Learning the Heart, Inside and Out

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    For the third day of my J-Term, I began with some more lighter readings about first understanding what an echocardiogram is, so that when I begin to look at clinical data at the end of this first week, I'll understand how the data was found and how to look at different results from echocardiograms. Everything I read today really interested me, since I never really knew anything about echocardiograms more or less what they even were. Throughout the day, I read three articles about what an echocardiogram was, how to look at and interpret their results, as well as a general explanation of the heart's anatomy itself.      The first article I read mainly talked about what exactly an echocardiogram was, and introducing the different ways in which it was used at a hospital. This article really fascinated me since I had never really known this much about the heart and echocardiograms before. Throughout my reading of the second and third articles, I also began to get a little sh
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Day 2: My Continued Investigation

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    For the second day of my J-Term, I began my morning by reading more background on heart failure, specifically heart failure in relation to liver diseases and liver transplantation. The first journal I read seemed to be a bit harder to read through than I what I read yesterday, since there were a lot more medical terms that I didn’t know of yet. Throughout the reading, I was able to learn that the there’s a deep relationship between the liver and the heart, specifically pertaining to liver transplantation (LT) and heart failure (HF). I also learned that there are many factors in which heart failure can occur due to liver disease and/or transplantation, such as cirrhotic cardiomyopathy, which can occur because of liver cirrhosis.      The next two articles I read touched more specifically on something that I’d never learned before. They both mainly talked about the relationship between liver disease (LT) and pulmonary hypertension (PH). These articles were more shocking to me, becaus
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Day 1: A Deep Dive

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       Starting off the first day of J-Term, I began with a deep dive into the general ways in which liver transplantation patients are chosen, as well as the contraindications against which patients to choose.       Throughout the reading, there were a few terms that I didn’t recognize, but I was able to understand and find out that the criteria for liver transplant patients is a lot more specific than I thought. It somewhat shocked me that there was a specific criteria called the Child-Turcotte-Pugh (CTP) classification system just to estimate the severity of a patient’s cirrhosis.         While reading, I was even more shocked at all the things I didn’t know, like there are a lot more contraindications for liver transplantation in comparison to indications. In the last few pages of this chapter, I also began to find out that there’s a specific science and timing to when patients get liver transplants, which interested me a lot. I never knew that the timing for transplantation held s
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