Blood Pimping

Our seminars yesterday were kind of interesting. The first seminar leader didn't show up at all (apparently he thought he was supposed to come on Friday), while the second one did come, but he basically used a lot of the same slides that he showed us last year. All in all, yesterday was not the greatest of seminar days. But the afternoon session more than made up for it. I had my heme clinical correlation, and the first half of it was just amazing. For that part, we went to the heme path lab and looked at a bunch of slides of different red blood cell diseases. The doctor was pimping us pretty mercilessly, but it wasn't mean-spirited. I felt like I really learned a lot. After we were done looking at the slides, we went on the wards to see some patients. This wasn't quite as successful. Somehow, none of them were in their rooms, and we wound up having another pimp session instead where we had to come up with the differential diagnosis (possible causes) for splenomegaly (an enlarged spleen). After we had come up with all the easy and obvious causes, he was pushing us to come up with some more esoteric ones. I can see now why internal medicine rounds take as long as they do!

Today was a better seminar day. The regular scheduled seminar was about coagulation, and we were back to our small groups again. I know it's a lot more work for the faculty because they have to find four seminar leaders instead of just one, but small group seminars are so much better than large groups. Afterward, the seminar leader who missed class yesterday came and gave us his presentation on iron metabolism and overload. I was considering not staying for it, but I decided that I would, and I think it was worth getting that review. Iron metabolism is a pretty important and complex topic. I was supposed to have clinic this afternoon, but my preceptor is away on vacation. Since it was so crazy last week and I wanted to have some extra study time anyway, I decided not to go to clinic this week. (We are allowed to miss up to three days of clinic for the year.) It was really nice coming home early and having a chance to get somewhat caught up on my work.