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.

Silly Spirochetes!

The whole first-year class is in full less sleep, more caffeine, less fun, more stress, less proper meals, and more studying mode this week.  We take our bacteriology midterm tomorrow afternoon and our physiology midterm on Thursday.  Oh, and there's a take-home exam for evidence-based medicine to finish in there somewhere as well.  And an anatomy quiz that I think everyone's behind in on Monday.  Ugh.

Bacteriology is going to come down to recognition for me.  His exams are very repetitive year to year, and while I know it's awful to be studying for an exam instead of more ingrained knowledge, I just am not gaining a good learning pattern from the class to do that.  I know a lot of generalities for each group - which cause shipping fever and pneumonia, which cause enteritis, which are intracellular, etc. - but a lot of the nitty gritty specifics aren't going to stick for very long.  And that's okay.  I think I'll be easily able to recall a lot of this stuff in second and third year when we get into medicine and actual diseases.  Once I learn about the disease process more in-depth, pinning a bacteria to it will be easier rather than the other way around.  Overall, I think/hope it'll be okay.  Maybe not the best test ever but definitely not the worst.

Even though physiology is further away, I've started studying for that even more just because I think it'll be more difficult.  It's a lot of neural pathways that we have to trace from beginning to end...and there are a lot of big, nasty words!  Some of the exam consists of those gross multiple-multiple choice questions (A and B but not C or D, all of the above except E, etc.) and the rest is drawing and explaining pathways.  Tough to keep them from getting mixed up a lot in my head, so I'm putting a lot of time into talking myself through all of the pieces.

I did well on some of the past stuff we just got back - aced my anatomy and bacteriology quizzes and rocked my histology exam.  That class is freaking awesome.  I've always been interested in microscope work and learning how everything "fits" together - which is why I can't wait for our pathology classes.  The professor for histology is soooooo energetic and fun and keeps everything simple and comprehensive.  A lot of the other histology stuff I've done before had teachers who just showed us slides and had us learn what they were; he actually takes the time to explain why we're seeing what we're seeing, how it relates to function, what the problems are with the structures, etc.  Makes it a lot of fun (and simple) to see how complex but "natural" the body's organization is.

And that's my love affair with histology.

And I can't believe I didn't talk about our turkeys in TAU!  My group had our poultry lab session and we got to go to the campus turkey house with about 2,000 turkeys!  And they were adorable and had soooo much personality; it made me a little sad to realize that birds which are produced by the billions actually are that friendly.  As soon as we got close to the house, they started running up and down the sides of the barn and fighting to get close to the door - they loooove people.  While we listened to our lecture on management, we had dozens of them all around us pecking at our boots and coveralls and falling asleep on our feet.  Too cute.  Then we got to practice catching and restraining them (not difficult - they fell asleep in our arms) and then doing preliminary exams of their beaks, eyes, feet, cloaca, etc.  Too much fun for a school day!  It makes me want some turkeys of my own.

Otherwise, I'm getting over a nasty cold that hit me last Friday.  I was wiped out on Friday and Saturday morning and am still hacking a lot.  I don't get sick often, but when I do, stuff seems to stick around in my lungs for a long time.  I did manage to get out this weekend to go to school for a review session and then to the farmer's market; picked up some apples and fresh veggies.  Broke out the Crockpot tonight and made a huge vat of minestrone soup, so I have dinner for the next week. :)

Also, I get several chances to bake this week, and I'm sooooo excited.  I put together a snack session on Wednesday morning to celebrate our September birthdays, and there's an SCEVCCS (emergency and critical care) bake sale on Thursday.  Hooray!

Guess I'll do another half hour of bacteriology before bed.  I think I'll be dreaming of enteritis tonight...as gross as that is...