Pathology?

We had a pretty informative lunch meeting today for the PathHeads club about summer job opportunities and externships in the pathology field.  Really would love to get one of those for the coming summer break.  There's the chance to work in the clinical pathology lab at the vet school, which would be helpful no matter what career I enter.  Think that'll be on my short-list of applications this year.

Pathology is pretty freaking cool and something I'm seriously interested in exploring as a possible career.  Just being able to see how everything fits together in a case and either be instrumental in designing the best possible treatment plan (if you're in clinical path) or figuring out what happened in a case post mortem (if you're in anatomical path) is amazing.  The fact that disease follows a set, almost regimented, series of steps and that hardly anything is random or unexplainable in the body is amazing, and pathologists are lucky enough to be the ones who put all the pieces and steps together in a logical order.

I still am so unsure of what I want to do, but this avenue for my future career appeals to me more every time I hear and learn about it.  There's also a dinner talk coming up with hospital interns and residencies about pursuing further training after completing a veterinary degree.  We heard from an admissions committee member a few weeks ago in our careers class, and that was a frightening and sobering talk.  I'd love to hear more about the process of getting there and the experience of being there from doctors who are just now in the middle of it.  I'm sure it'll still be overwhelming to think about, but hopefully some good information will come out of it.

And on the subject of stuff involving live animals, my TAU group had our dairy cattle lab today.  I LOVE dairy medicine.  Like, a lot.  You can't get much better than a cow for a patient, and they really are incredible animals.  Next time you're near an adult Holstein cow (meaning female, already had at least one baby), take a look at the abdomen.  You'll see these big pipe-like ripples running through the skin.  Those are veins and arteries that are supplying the udder!  To produce an average of 23,000 pounds of milk per year (seriously!!!) they have to send an enormous amount of blood to the udder all day, every day.  Amazing, amazing stuff.  But anyway, we got to cast the cows (meaning, pull them down with ropes to do a physical exam with them prone), halter them, and practice bleeding from the tail veins.  That class is sooooo much fun - getting to be outside, working with live animals in beautiful fall weather, and learning about hands-on veterinary care is a blast.

This weekend is going to be consumed with huge amounts of studying.  The anatomy exam on Wednesday is going to eat up the majority of my time, but I'd like to squeeze some bacteriology in there as well...seeing as how we have a quiz on Tuesday.  Anatomy is pretty amazing.  Seeing how everything fits together, how form and function are so meshed, and how species can be both incredibly similar but vastly different is lots of fun.  However, being in the lab for 10+ hours per week, plunging your hands into a plastic tub to pull out a male reproductive tract specimen (testes and all), and opening your locker to smell a big whiff of formalin can make it lose some of its charm. 

Once this exam is over and I can enjoy Fall Break, I think I'll be refreshed and ready to finish up the last weeks of the semester.  Until then, I'll see you in the lab.