Thursday, October 31, 2013

Happy Halloween

My class is dressed as the Despicable Me cast today (Minions, Vector, and the fluffy unicorn)! This is how we keep our sanity in a week of exams!

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Gross Specimen Conferences


On Friday we had our monthly gross specimen conference.   For these conferences the PAs bring  specimens that they’ve had over the month and the Pathology Residents have to try and diagnose what they see based on the gross morphologic findings.   This month’s topic was bone and soft tissue tumors.  One of the specimens was a very large leiomyosarcoma (about the size of a softball).  In case you are curious, a leiomyosarcoma is a malignant tumor of smooth muscle cells, which occurs most often in the uterus and retroperitoneal soft tissue.

A Leiomyosarcoma courtesy of Google
These gross specimen conferences and my gross room rotations always make me curious of how masses can become so large before causing significant problems (or perhaps people are just ignoring the symptoms).  I would love to have the opportunity to observe a surgery for a specimen that would end up at my grossing station.  It would be great to see the whole processes and have a better perspective of how a mass might look in the body with respect to organs and other structures.