Pathology!

Today was my first club-related activity: clinical pathology rounds! When club day came along last week, I signed up for three clubs but will be dropping one so it ends up being the pathology club and the lab animal club that I'm a member of. I chose lab animal because that is my main interest but I added pathology because necropsy has always fascinated me. What I didn't realize is the role that histology plays within pathology. And guess what my favorite class by far is this semester? Histology! So it was kind of like the perfect storm of a club for me, haha.

I got to sleep in today because our farm animal field trips are only every other Wednesday. I did an hour or so of studying this morning (I really need to do more, I think, but that's another post), stopped by the gas station to fill up my two low tires and went to the clinical pathology rounds. The club's advisor is a clinical pathologist and professor at the school and she's the one that heads up the "rounds". She brought two papers for us: one on how to make/analyze a proper blood smear and the other with three real cases that had come through the teaching hospital. Apparently we do one hemotological (blood) and one cytological (tissue). So we got the blood work results as well as the blood smear from the first case and got to talk about regenerative anemia, which was a big part of my structure and function class later in the afternoon! It was really awesome to have it all start to come together. Not to mention that because I love histology, looking at slides was fun.

Anyway, as I said I have some studying to do. Gross pathology rounds are tomorrow afternoon, though; I hope they're as much fun/helpful as the clinical ones were today!