Pharm studying...

I. need. a. nap. I woke up at 5 am this morning, just like I did back in February on the untapered dose of prednisone. Alas, it was not accompanied by the irrepressible urge to study. It could have been; I caught an early bus to school, but I got sidetracked by the lake and took mostly blurry photos of geese for a while. If I'm going to make a habit of this, I really ought to start carrying my nice camera. It's not pocket sized, and it has the drawbacks of middle-range digital (grainy ISO, anyone?). But I can force it to do things like take photos in poor light that are not irretrievably blurry (or grainy), sometimes within seconds of pressing the button.

At any rate, I still have studying for the exam tomorrow to do, but my eyes are so tired it's distracting. So...perhaps a little nap...

path studying

I think the reason systemic pathology is so hard is because it completely fails to be cumulative. I'm not talking about the exams. The exams are the worst sort of cumulative, because they're two to three hundred different things to know. The class itself, though has no underlying direction. With clinical pathology, you have to know lecture 1 before lecture 2 will make sense, and the same goes for labs. It's easier to keep track of what you know and don't know. With systemic path, however, they really do just keep throwing names of diseases at us. With reproductive and dermatology it's especially bad, because although the diseases are different, all the symptoms seem to be pretty much the same. There's swelling. There's erosions. There may be keratin! And then you differentiate based on...well, based on whether the notes match up word for word with the picture's caption.

Studying after the first ten hours is just frustrating, when you're STILL just scrolling through disease (it's not even that they're diseases, they're specific symptoms which may or may not have a known disease attached).

But for a bit of a change, my kitchen sink clogged up! I used up the last of the drain-o, it's still not draining right, and my entire apartment now smells like rotting eggs. I think it may be time to take my notes to the gym and enjoy the ellipticals for a while.

Hymenolepsis

I have seen the Midgard Serpent and it is a tapeworm.

No, really.

In lab today, we had really beautiful examples of rat tapeworms (hymenolepsis diminuta). The professor put about an inch length on a slide for us to look at, and the first impression on looking through the slide is "Holy heck, it's MOVING!" Which I may have mentioned in the past as a special feature of parasitology lab. It was all the more impressive because through the eyepieces, what was a thin white thread has become a vast field of undulating, scale-like segments. Marvelous to behold, and squirm-inducing.

The odd thing about tapeworms, though, is that as far as parasites go they're pretty innocuous. They are mightily impressive, but they like to just hang out in the lumen of the gut and grow. Granted, they grow pretty impressively. And a couple of really big ones could potentially cause some obstruction. But it's nothing like the damage liver flukes or roundworms do.

Prions

The wet lab today was excellent, not least because I successfully removed a cow's spinal cord on the first go. With a grapefruit spoon. The sheep's spinal cord was trickier, and I'm afraid I shaved off half the section I was supposed to be retrieving, but hey, I found the tonsils! And the retropharyngeal lymph nodes too. An entire year of anatomy and it took a fresh sheep head to make me realize where the darn things are located. It becomes much more relevant when you are trying to obtain samples for very specific histologic testing. In anatomy, it was just, "tell the difference between fifteen different pinkish squishy bits of tissue."

I don't think any of the heads we were working with were scrapie-positive (though with sheep, you never know), but the demo head did come from a deer with CWD symptoms. I have been in the same room with prions...

If only prions weren't so potentially super-super-scary, they would be an awesome thing to study. However, as it is, they seem a little too subtle for working with. In some ways, they are in the same category with tuberculosis and smallpox; the deadly diseases that are so subtle that they've already escaped control again (granted, smallpox has been declared eliminated. But the book Demon in the Freezer makes a pretty convincing case that it would be too easy for it to make a reappearance).

I think this is what makes parasitology so appealing on one level: all you have to do is look, and if the worms are there you'll see them. And you can even remove them by hand if all else fails (sometimes). They make us squirm, but it is productive squirming! Prions, on the other hand, are virtually undetectable and insidious. They can't be killed, they can't be stopped, all you can do is avoid them and try to make sure they don't spread. Which is why CWD is a scary thing, for all that its impact hasn't really been seen yet. Deer across the country are seeding the ground with prions, and no one knows what's going to happen. But the impact, if any, is so glacially slow in becoming apparent that very little action is being taken.

Brr. Yeah, it was an excellent wet lab, but not the sort of stuff that makes you sleep soundly at night.

Snow Frog!

What does this have to do with studying/school/anything?

...

But it was really fun!

Bad knee unregarded, I needed exercise yesterday, so I took the dogs for a walk through the woods. And then there was this wonderful field of snow, and the snow was at that soft crunchy, almost granular stage, where it's really easy to dig into but also compacts into solid lumps very well.

And now it will melt, because we're going through a warm period. But hey, it had one good afternoon watching the sunset across fields of cows, so 'sgood.

Schistosomes are my favorite...

Parasitology lab scores high, high marks for featuring microscopic things that WRIGGLE! We spend so much time looking at blood smears and tissue samples and path specimens (scenterific is the word that comes to mind every Monday morning as I walk in and get a good lungful) that things that move are unique and wonderful. Both squirmy and squirm-inducing. Last time we had live microfilaria in hepatocrit tubes (doin' the dirofilaria dance) and on blood smears.

This week was flukes and other wonderful critters that camp out in the liver (and lungs). I was amazed at the similarity of paragonimus lung flukes to moldy pumpkin seeds: they have the exact same ellipsoid shape and off-putting shade of greenish brown. And Fasciola liver flukes are absolutely lovely, they look like those little leaves that accompany the flowers on linden trees. But with intestines.

Best of all were the schistosomes. These are the wormy things behind swimmer's itch, though that's just in people. In dogs they penetrate the skin and go to the liver. They then eventually work their way to the mesenteric veins. where the males and females hook up for a lifelong spooning session. One of our lecturers very kindly provided live specimens in mouse mesentery, so we were able to see the adults in all their, erm, romantic entanglement. Every egg has a little spike on it that helps it move into the lumen of the bowel (and everywhere else). They're pretty immunogenic, so infected animals end up with lots and lots of granulomas wherever the eggs randomly lodge themselves.

We did tissue squash preps with a thoroughly granulomatous liver. My lab partner isn't a great fan of pathology once it's visible with the naked eye, so I had the privilege of setting up the slide. Large chunks of liver with numerous oval eggs: Success! We were advised to keep watching. Sure enough, after a decent amount of time sitting on a warm microscope, a few of the eggs showed signs of life--little larvae starting to squirm around inside. I was fascinated and would have happily waited for them to hatch, but again, my lab partner wanted to finish with the other slides assigned for the day, so I regretfully put the babies aside. When I came back to the slide, all I could find were the immature eggs and empty egg casings--the larvae had hatched and disappeared.

I was a bit disappointed, and scrolled around a bit more in search of a decently mature egg that might be ready to hatch. Then something shot by in the field of view. Rather like being passed by a car doing 80 on the interstate. I hurried after it as best I could (alas, I did not have enough practice with etch-a-sketches for truly proficient microscope driving). More by accident than anything, it darted back into view again--a tiny, bouncing baby schistosome miracidium. It was very cute, in a flubber sort of way. NOT something I want swimming around my internal organs, mind you. It spun around as a blob, then stretched itself out and darted away again. You could tell around the lab who had gotten to the miracidium stage of their squash mount, because it's hard NOT to exclaim when of of these things swims into your field of view and waves.

Dairy cows

I went and hung out with vet students this evening. Hoard's Dairyman, which is THE magazine of the dairy world, has an annual judging contest where you look at sets of cows and rank them. So we were sitting around a room staring at glossy magazine pages of Holsteins and Jerseys and Brown Swiss, occasionally saying things like, "I really like A's udder in the front, but D has better teats."

All my cow judging experience is with beef, so I don't know that I was picking them out on quite the right criteria. But anytime I get free pizza and chocolate sounds like a good time to me!

Now, however, I have the prospect of studying looming ahead of me...It will be hard to kick myself into gear for it tonight, because we have no exams for a couple of weeks, so there's no sense of priority. On the other hand, I wasted all my time last night discovering that there are very few good wedding dresses out there that that can double as belly dance outfits. (A belly dancer friend who got married had a beautiful, very structured dress that looked great but did not move well at all.) Not a very fruitful search. And since there will be a lot of time before this question of wedding dresses is even relevant, I imagine my time is much better spent learning about infectious disease.

*attempting to muster enthusiasm*

All righty. Path notes, I shall overcome!