Tri-3, Wk13, Day 191, Friday, Little Blue Dots

Today was pretty fascinating overall. We started in on Chapter 6 in Pathology which covers Neoplasia which most people might refer to as cancer. A lot of words aren't meaning what they used to. Terms and phrases which used to be part of my everyday lexicon now seem vague and without meaning or don't make much sense anymore. Take the notion of a heart attack for instance. That doesn't really mean anything in a medical sense and I see more comfort in thinking of it in terms of infarction, ischemia and necrosis. I think terminology change first happened in gross anatomy when I started to wonder what an ankle was. I'm familiar with a lateral and medial malleolus but am no longer sure exactly what an ankle refers to, in particular, which side of the leg, medial or lateral?

Anyway - Todays pic of the day is from my microbiology lab class and those are my fingers holding a petri dish I was using in class to help determine an unknown bacteria. Two classes ago, I did a gram staining of my unknown and found it to be a gram positive cocci. Gram positive kind of just means it was blue under the microscope and cocci refers to its shape or morphology which happens to be like little dots. I figured I had a staphylococcus type of bacterium and to help narrow down which type of staph we were dealing with I put some of my unknown in the middle of a blood agar petri dish to see if my unknown would eat the blood or not. :)

Well, it did. The bacterium is in the center of the dish and you can notice clear areas around the bacterium where the blood agar is being consumed. Technically, this is known as beta hemolytic and the great part about that is I could then conclude that I was working with staph aureus! :)

That means I don't have to go to lab next Tuesday because I've already figured out what I have! :)

Heck, i just remembered I have that volunteer thing tomorrow at the St. Louis Science Center. I've got a ton of studying to do. Physio exam on Monday along with my diversified practical.

It's make or break time in Diversified. Based on my midterm performance, I won't pass the class so I've really got to pull out something good on Monday or I won't move on to Tri-4. If any class is failed then you don't move forward ...at least not as fast as you otherwise could. We won't think about that possibility for now.