by Aozora Ito, Staff Writer
Last Tuesday, Medical Society attended a Surgical Skills Day at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center. This event was part of the CresecentOC Mentorship Program (CMP) and hosted by the Department of Urology at UCI Medical Center.
The mentorship program was created by Victoria Lee (’16), the president of Medical Society, and Linda Huynh, a UCI alumni from Fountain Valley High School.
“Organizing a group to attend the surgical skills day hosted by one of UCI medical center’s research department was definitely an exciting and educational experience!” Lee said.
A group of 20 Medical Society members from FVHS and a group of students from Mar Vista High School participated in this event.
The event started off with an introductory lecture by Doug Skarecky, a senior researcher, who explained the modern developments of minimally invasive surgery and the history of surgery. Following that, the students were divided into five groups and rotated around five stations.
“It was a great experience, we got to work with machines that surgeons actually use in the operating rooms and learned useful surgical procedures including stitching, knotting, and how to work scopes like cystoscope,” said Dorothy Ngo (’18), the treasurer of Medical Society.
In one of the stations, Instructor Carlos Gomez-Mustafa introduced a $1.5 million Da Vinci Robot and its process of a minimally invasive operation. This machine featured the ability to scale down motion, eliminate accidental movements such as shaking of the hand and a three-dimensional screen to show depth perception which people found to be extremely useful.
In another station, Instructor Kenny Schmitt demonstrated how to utilize cystoscopy and ureteroscopy on a red bell pepper to extract its seeds. The purpose of this activity was to show how equipments are used to remove kidney stones.
“Being exposed to those people, we definitely learned a lot from them. They talked to us about their personal experience with school and gave us advice,” Ngo said.
Photos provided by Linda Huynh.
