Hi everyone! After approximately 48 hours of continuous 3D printing, we are officially done with our main design project here at Hospital de Amor! Once everything was printed, we tested our G-code and aligner, and everything works perfectly! I won’t lie, the constant setbacks with ordering and shipping had me a bit worried, but everything worked out in the end. I attached a little GIF below so you guys can see the slide stainer in action!
Now all we really have left to do is test this setup with the hospital’s protocol in order to ensure standards are met. We have adapted the design to adhere exactly to the hospital’s protocol, so we are pretty confident that we will have no problem. I think these validation test will be done this week once Dr.Fabio is back from his conference, so more updates to come!
This week, the research institute within the hospital hosted a kind of open house with prospective students from all across Brazil. Current PIs and students had the chance to present their work and what a typical day looks like for them. We were able to sit in on one of our friends’ PI’s presentations, where she spoke about the importance of translation study when it comes to developing cancer treatments for both adult and pediatric cancer patients based on rat models. Despite everything being in Portuguese, I think I was able to follow along pretty well with everything being said. This is definitely an improvement, looking back at my first week here!
This past weekend, we also got to participate in Barretos’s version of Thanksgiving, or at least that was the closest comparison we could make. We tried the tastiest foods like stone-roasted pork, pastels, Paçoca, and cocadas. I honestly can’t even decide what my favorite dish has been so far! To end the night off, we went to our friend’s family farm for a little star gazing and it was the most beautiful sight! I took pictures on my phone, but they don’t even come close to how beautiful it looked in real life.
