Life at the General

"A watched lab never stops pending." - wise words from my fellow sub-i Steph.

Some of the attending teaching rounds for this rotation have given me weird flashbacks of first and second year. My attending is really into hands-on visual learning so we took field trips down to the hematology and microbiology labs. With hematology, we reviewed peripheral blood smears, looking at sickle cell anemia, schistocytes, plasmodium falciparum, and chronic myelogenous leukemia. For a whole year now, I've relied on reports ("1+ polychromatophilia, 1+ ovalocytes") and I've lost touch of how beautiful (yes) blood smears really are. It's quite fun hunting for that wayward basophil or deducing multiple myeloma from rouleaux.

But even more fun was the microbiology. This gave me flashbacks to my summer working on Pseudomonas, that blue-green queen of rods. The smell, the agar, the gram-stain apparatus across the sinks were all quite reminiscent of micro lab. Remember optochin? How do you calculate MIC? We looked at slides and plates. It was fun.

Though we won't be experts at hematopathology or microbiology, having a sense of what thinking goes into such disciplines is important. It's too easy to read report conclusions and forget how much expertise goes into interpreting smears or slides. I do think it would be fun to do gram stains at the bedside, but alas, such days are gone.

Yes, my laboratory tests are still pending.