WILTIMS #435-7: Experimenting

On Thursday, I was given a blessed reprieve from the torture of geriatric clinic so that I could present a poster at our school's Medical Student Research Forum. The poster was displaying an incredibly deceiving selection of information on the research that I helped gather as one of the leaders of the Cancer Education Awareness Program club. The data were accurate but of extremely narrow usefulness. I have trash-talked this research for so long, it was hard to sell it to reviewers and interested passersby with a straight face.

After having two reviewers hear us out, my presentation partner and I were fairly confident that we weren't winning any awards. Still, just to be sure, I stayed around through the big oral presentations to await the official losers' notice. The presentations were surprisingly good. The first guy's research had made national headlines when his team mapped the NYC subway biome and found plague and anthrax among the other more benign pathogens.

ThursdayIL: Actually, they don't think they found anthrax and plague. Nearly half of the life they found was unidentifiable by current techniques and it's more likely that the weird ones they did find were actually just as of yet unknown close relatives of those oddball bugs.

Friday, I was back at the hospital for my last day in geriatric clinic. The most interesting patient encounter of the day was actually due to a patient's daughter who had psychiatric problems of her own and yelled at our team for "experimenting" on her mildly demented father. All medications have potential adverse reactions and we can't (yet) predict which patients which react poorly. This patient may have had a reaction to a normally very safe medication we recently started... or the daughter may have altered his other psychiatric medications without consulting us. It was hard to tell who was actually "experimenting."

FridayIL: Frailty is an actual clinical diagnosis. Though it is not a true pathology, if a patient meets the (extremely specific) criteria then they statistically have significantly increased mortality from all causes.

Today I started with a new team on the inpatient wards, with whom I will slog out the remaining week and a half of this rotation (yikes!). Due to some weirdness with scheduling we practically had our whole previous team together for the day, so it was like a surprise reunion. I miss that team (sniff!).

TIL: Isothenuria is when the urine is osmotically similar to blood (neither concentrated nor dilute). This can be totally normal or a sign of renal failure depending on the broader clinical picture.

If a patient with a PMH (past medical history) of SCD (sickle cell disease) presents to the ER with symptoms that can be explained by a sickle cell crisis, check the reticulocyte count. The retic count represents the release of immature blood cells into the bloodstream and is a measure of hemolysis (blood cell death). The higher the count, the worse the hemolysis and the more severe the sickle cell crisis.

Pingueculae are a slight variation on pterygia, both lesions of the conjunctiva of the eye. Whereas a pterygium is seen more commonly on the nose-side of the eye and grow out toward the pupil, a pinguecula is usually seen on the ear-side of the eye and grows thicker, not moving in any direction.