I was very happy to receive the British Journal of Surgery prize for my paper: 'Does mechanical bowel preparation preceding colon cancer operation affect five year mortality and cancer recurrence rate?' at the ESCP Annual Meeting in Vienna in September 2012. As part of the ESCP/ASCRS reciprocal Travelling Fellow program, I was able to present my paper again at the ASCRS meeting in Phoenix, Arizona this year, and I would like to thank both ESCP and ASCRS for this opportunity.
The ESCP meeting in Vienna, and the ASCRS meeting in Phoenix are the first two international colorectal meetings I have ever attended, and I feel very fortunate to have experienced both these great meetings during such a short period of time. The ASCRS meeting offered many interesting sessions with a wide variety of topics and I found it both inspiring and educative.
I also took this opportunity to visit one of our worlds great marvels, the Grand Canyon, and going there with eight other convention attendees, I was able both to enjoy the spectacular scenery and learn about the everyday life of a surgeon in places as different as South Africa, South America and the US.
It was a great experience, for which I am very grateful to both ESCP and ASCRS.
Åsa Collin
Surgeon, Colorectal division
Uppsala University Hospital
