Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I'm very thankful that the university gives us the whole week off for Thanksgiving break. It has been nice to relax a little, but I've also been taking this time to get caught up on school work (yay for papers and study guides).  The week we come back from break will be extremely hectic, but we finally get to find out our clinical rotation schedule! I can't wait to start the clinical year and put all this knowledge to use.

On another note - one of my classmates got married this past weekend and our class had a great time celebrating with her and her husband.  I don't know how she managed to plan a wedding during the craziness of grad school, but it was beautiful!

PA Program with the bride - Congrats Amanda!

Almost There

So I have been terrible at blogging this semester (I apologize).  I could give you a million excuses as to why, but in all honesty this semester is just HARD.   For me it has by far been the hardest of them all.  Having 7 classes definitely keeps you busy at all times, but at least that means that the days are passing by at an alarming rate (only 57 days until we start clinical rotations)!  I cannot wait to start rotations, but we still have 6 exams, 3 quizzes, 1 essay, and 4 finals to get through first! 

And next Saturday is our frozen section lab test!  The goal of this test is to prepare good slides in under 7 minutes; this includes everything from cutting a piece of tissue from the specimen, freezing the tissue, cutting beautiful sections on the cryostat, staining with H&E, and coverslipping the slides.  I can remember back to the first frozen section lab and how horrible I was at the whole process.  I was completely awkward using my left hand (non-dominant hand) to pull the frozen tissue off the block and all of my slides would have wrinkles or tears.  But I’ve been spending a lot of time in the gross room practicing on hotdogs and am feeling much more confident now.

 

Practicing frozens on hotdog specimens