Blood Smears, PBL, POD, and Portfolio Done!

I am happy to report that I turned in the hard copy of my portfolio yesterday without a hitch. So that's it. I'm officially done with my first year of medical school now except for the last couple of weeks of class.

We were divided into four groups of eight for seminar. My group's seminar leader was the same hematologist who had been my communications preceptor. I really like him, and the workshop he conducted for us today was pretty good too. We worked our way through several cases of blood cell disorders and looked at slides of blood smears. As much as I usually hate histology stuff, these were interesting. I think I already mentioned that one of the pathologists promised me that I'd enjoy path way more than I like histo. So far at least, that seems to be true.

Yet another PBL patient survived her illness, thankfully. After having had two in a row die on us, now I'm a little paranoid about it. It sounds kind of silly on one hand, because of course we're not really seeing these patients. But the cases are based on real patients, and it's very real to me in that sense at least.

I really loved today's POD talk. It was about stress and its effect on the immune system. Dr. Moravec, who runs the POD sessions, gave part of the talk. But the main speaker was a CCF psychiatrist. He gave us some articles about things we could do to reduce stress. (Gee, I wonder why they thought we'd be feeling stressed the day after our portfolios were due???) The best part of the talk was toward the end, when he hooked up one of my classmates to his biofeedback machine so that we could see how someone's stress level could be measured. My poor classmate was kind of volunteered involuntarily, but was a very good sport about it. I think that this was one of the best, if not the best, POD talks that we've had all year.