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| Dr. Joel Aronowitz |
Dr. Joel Aronowitz: "So this is the portion toward the ear, and this is the portion in the front of the cheek. So let's take a look at what the tumor looks like on the inside, and we're going to split it down the middle, that's called bivalving, basically just cut that tumor right down the middle, and what we're going to see is a very abnormal appearance. So this is fronds of tumor, it's completely nothing but melanoma, you can see some hemorrhage within the tumor, you can see some hemorrhage here within the tumor, as it outgrows its blood supply, there's a little old blood coming out as I'm squeezing it. So this very grayish appearance is due to the very high DNA content, and Nathan, can you tell me something that we eat commonly that has a similar appearance, if you take a look at that, it's the color of onion, and it's very much the color of onion, and that's why when you're in grade school, sometimes in high school, you'll do an experiment to isolate DNA because onions have a lot of DNA, and why would the malignant tumor have a lot of DNA, Nathan? Do you think it's uncontrollably replicating? It's replicating very rapidly, so a lot of cells have duplicated their DNA and are in the midst of that duplication process, which is called what? Mitosis? Mitosis. And we'll see, if we look under the microscope, we'll see a lot of those cells reproducing, those mitotic cells, and that's very worrisome because we shouldn't see that kind of growth outside of a newborn, outside of an embryo, growing very rapidly like that, but otherwise most of our cells are not going to be dividing that rapidly. So you can see also that the pseudo capsule, the tissue around the edge here that's been pushed out of the way is intact, which makes me happy because it shows that I didn't open this up in the course of surgery, potentially spilling these malignant cells throughout the cheek, so hopefully we'll have good local control for some time to come. So we'll wait and get the pathology report back and let you know what that shows, and then we'll follow this very pleasant, gentlemanly line in his postoperative course as much as we can. So we'll see you later, direct from Aronowitzland."
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