WILTIMS #178: 13 hour day

This was one of the longest days I've had at school (excluding all day/night study days). To give you an idea, here's today's schedule:

06:30 Get up
07:25 Leave house
08:00 Pathology and microbiology doubleheader quiz
09:00 2 hours of microbiology lecture
11:00 Go to student health center for jammed finger
11:30 Prepare for afternoon small group session
12:30 Lunch
13:00 2.5 hour pathology small group session
15:30 Get x-ray of jammed finger
17:00 Free pizza dinner for ethics in medicine club movie night
17:30 Begin watching abortion documentary
19:00 Sneak out for club treasurer meeting (representing 2 clubs)
19:20 Return for end of (super-long) documentary
20:00 Discuss abortion debate and documentary with classmates
20:45 Leave for home with a free leftover pizza
21:15 Watch some tennis and start writing this blog post

First of all, regarding the finger x-rays, I jammed my finger while playing flag football a couple weeks ago and it has just refused to get better. So after talking to finger fracturees from last season, I decided to make a trip to the school's nurse practitioner to make sure nothing serious is going on. She sent me some x-rays to peak at the innards of the inflamed joint. This is all very easy when you are already on a major medical campus, so I had the scans done this afternoon. The radiology tech was really cool and when I asked if I could get a copy of the scan (presumably on a CD) he offered to give me physical film printouts too! So now I have some enormous films of my right ring finger. As far as I can tell, nothing looks broken, but the cartilage and/or joint capsule might have been torn up a bit. Updates to follow once actually qualified medical professionals interpret the images.

The abortion documentary was good conversation starter for the ethics club. It's weird having that debate with a group of people that are not just potential users of abortion services, but also potential practitioners of them. It seems most medical students are loosely pro-choice (and socially liberal in general), if only on the principle of saving lives from unsafe illegal abortions that used to be one of the leading killers of women of childbearing age as recently as the middle of the last century. But very few med students have an intention to actually train to learn the procedure. I think we'd all rather write a prescription for birth control and hope to undercut the need for abortions in the first place. This issue is way more complicated than I'm glibly mentioning here, but I wanted to mention it nonetheless.

TIL: One of the reasons that our appendices occasionally try to explode and kill us is that they are a highly lymphoid tissue, much like your tonsils. The problem with this being that, just as your tonsils might swell when fighting an infection, the walls of the appendix can swell and pinch off the rest of the little dead end tube that makes up this gastrointestinal fold, trapping a growing collection of pus in the lumen of the tube, risking rupture and subsequent septic infection.