November Update/ Heartwell Project Fundraiser Launch

The Heartwell Project's fundraiser has now been active and circulating around social media (and in the email inboxes of a few dozen friends) for more than a full day. We've already raised more than $700! It feels great to finally get things moving; a lot of my internship-related work has been subverted in the past few weeks due to school, college apps and other priorities, and this was one thing that I knew I just had to get started on. The fall has sped by-- its already been five months since Understanding Aortic Stenosis was posted to YouTube. I see no better way to end the year than by raising money for the next chapter of this project, and I'm glad things are going swimmingly.

However, before talking more about Heartwell, let's discuss the state of the internship as a whole.

To be completely honest, I don't have much more to say about most of Dr. Nguyen's cases-- he doesn't perform specific ones for his pleasure, he does them because it's a part of his job and he is specialized in a handful of procedures. This limits the kinds of surgery that I get to see, and I feel as though I've covered most of what he does frequently--TAVRs/TAVIs, CABGs, AVRs, MVRs...I've talked about them all,  and extensively so. If I were to go any further, it would be into the realm of serious and verging-on-professional-tier research information; the point of this blog was never to do that, but rather to break down cases so that more people could understand them. It's basically just a more in-depth (albeit written) form of The Heartwell Project, and it was through this blog that I first learned to understand medical information. For my first few posts to the blog, I was learning alongside all those who read it. It's meant a lot to me in the past year, but these case analyses will be fewer in number over the coming months, unless I feel that they're merited.

I'll be keeping the blog primarily focused on project updates for the foreseeable future; provided that we raise the requisite amount of money to carry on into the production of the video series, the blog will then segue into covering that progression. I'm excited to see how things will develop!

Here's a link to the fundraiser, which I encourage any readers to take a look at and consider donating to:
https://www.crowdrise.com/the-heartwell-project