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 such a complicated system behind it (the MELD system). 

    The last topic in the first chapter was retransplantation, which was something I knew existed, but I never really knew what went into retransplanting grafts specifically, so that part of the chapter really interested me and shocked me as well.

    After finishing up Chapter 1, I headed home and ended my first day of my Independent J-Term!

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