Today we completed a right of passage in the medical field: we stabbed each other. Specifically, we stabbed each other in antecubital veins with a 23 gauge butterfly needle, i.e. practiced drawing blood from each other's arms.
It was a little nerve wracking to practice on an actual person, but as with the prostate and female pelvic exams, I am so grateful to get to practice this on a live person who is not my patient. And just like with those exams, we were given a mannequin-like piece of plastic and rubber to practice on first. You can see the quite literally disembodied arm that we had to practice on. It's about as high tech as it gets, but it was still nothing like practicing on another person, let alone a friend.
I love how everyone came together to support each other. Med students are often told they are many things: smart, dedicated, type-A, crazy. But sometimes I forget how kind they can be. We are all nervous about both today and the weeks to come as we finally put our studies to practice. We have been reminded repeatedly this week that we are both talented, for having made it this far, and human, as we will no doubt soon prove. So as we nervously stuck each other with needles, I loved to see this anxiety channeled into comfort and support for each other. A special thanks to my classmate Cyril for letting me photograph her as she voluntarily allowed a first-time phlebotomist wield a needle at her particularly shy veins. S'ok though, my old roommate Brian's got her back. We have scary things to come this year, but I think we'll be fine so long as we each watch each other's back.
TIL: A spiral CT is actually a misnomer. A spiral is two dimensional (think of those spinning hypnosis spirals you see on TV). A "spiral" CT is actually a helix - a three dimensional spring-like shape (à la the DNA double helix). A helical CT is done by continuously moving the patient through an x-ray machine that spins in a circle. This creates a ribbon-like helical image which can provide a much more rapid comprehensive scan that a conventional slice-based CT scan.
AP and PA chest x-rays are theoretically the same but different in practice. AP stands for anterior-posterior, and PA is posterior-anterior, each referring to the direction of travel of the x-rays through the body. There is a small difference in the size of the tissues in reference to each other due to the different angled paths the x-rays take through the body, but otherwise, as x-ray images are two-dimensional, the direction that you shoot them shouldn't matter. The actual difference is in the way that each is shot. A PA chest x-ray is taken with the patient standing against a detector with the x-ray at the other end of the room. An AP is often taken from a portable x-ray machine with the patient lying in bed. The decreased distance allows for more distortion of the image due to the less parallel paths of the electromagnetic waves. Thus, though they are very similar, PAs are usually preferable to APs.
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