TRI-5, Wk7&8, Days 299 & 300, Fri & Mon

Wow, was that really day 300 on Monday? Holy Cow. We've got our Dx Imag midterm this Thursday and Basic III midterm on Friday. I also shadow interns again this Friday. We have to dress up a bit when working in the clinic so I bought a few new shirts, ties & pair of pants last week before my first stint in the Health Center.

Next week, on Wednesday (my birthday!) we have our Radiologic Positioning exam which is scheduled from noon to 4 p.m. or however long it takes for everyone to finish.

I guess this is a pretty tough semester. Unlike earlier in the semester when I asked people what they thought, I'm now getting responses like "it's the toughest semester yet" when before some people thought it was the easiest. Of course, the people that thought it was easy hadn't done any of the reading yet and we hadn't had any midterms either.

For the most part, I've been pushing myself harder than the semester has been pushing me which means I've generally done everything I'm supposed to in order to get through the semester. Div IV could still hold me up.

I noticed in Laboratory Diagnosis (lab dx) today that I'm starting to develop a bit of a theory towards disease (dz) and our current means of classifying various dz's. I can't quite fully articulate the paradigm but, it seems like for most dz's it's like we have a bunch of dial meters with little needles and when ever a certain combination of those needles go into the red zone then we may conclude we have a specific dz such as Grave's dz or diabetes. The little meters I'm referring to would be the various test we can perform on patients (pts).

Some dz's may be more conclusive with a single evaluation such as may be the case with Ewings sarcoma or Paget's dz via x-ray but, others require a more specific combination of lab results.

Part of this new way of thinking may have gotten an extra kick from our Physical Dx class. We've been exposed to various dz over and over again, dz such as Cushings, Addisons, Cretinism and Myxedema again and again but, each time we're seeing the dz from a slightly different vantage point. Today in Phys dx we were specifically studying the faces or facies associated with different dz's. Quite literally, picture after picture of people with various dz's and what their face looks like with each dz.

Overall, it is a bit fascinating. Maybe from all the commuting I do I'm used to seeing my speedometer and tachometer which is where I'm getting the guage idea from or perhaps from older types of computers and equipment which uses such little dials to monitor things.

I suppose if a doctor could see an ongoing set of data for a pt in terms of laboratory test then we could see the progression from a healthy to dz state ...the thought here is with intervention but another type of thinking is more along the lines of "pre-diseases" or when certain changes in the body manifest themselves with partial symptoms of what may become tagged as a specific dz.

OK ....I'm going off on tangents now and Googling various dz's. Need to get back to bed ...just enough time to get an extra hour of sleep before I have to get up for school. :)