Week 8: Mmm, Free Lunch

Salutations! The only reason I just wrote "salutations" is because I wanted to greet you guys a different way every blog post, and all the obvious ones like "hi", "hello", and "yo" had been taken. So there you go.

Now I know what you're thinking. "Is this necessary?" No, no it really isn't.

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In Which I Invade Other Departments

My liver research and identification from last week continued this week, and I must say I've learnt quite a lot from it. If you don't remember what it was I was trying to accomplish last week, allow me to copy-paste my explanation from my previous post, not only to give you a refresher, but to fill required blog space.

"The fields of radiology and pathology are quite interconnected. At Mayo Clinic, both departments often end up treating/diagnosing the same patient livers for different reasons. Our radiology department wanted to know how accurate our diagnoses were, so I was given access to a report database called Illuminate Insight and told to find liver reports from the pathology department that had a ton of numbers in them, so that our doctors could cross reference radiology reports to check for accuracy."

Continuing the trend of filling said blog word requirement, (even though I'll probably exceed it anyway), allow me to define some of the most common terms I came across pertaining to the liver.

Cirrhosis - Scarring of liver tissue, often a result of fatty liver. Severe cases can lead to liver failure.

Steatosis - The abnormal retention of lipids in a cell. (In this case, liver cells.) This leads to vesicle enlargement. While steatosis and cirrhosis and independent of one another, severe steatosis can lead to fatty liver which can be a strong indicator of cirrhosis. There are two types of steatosis:
                  Macrovesicular: When the vesicle enlargement is enough to push at the nucleus of the cell.
                  Microvesicular: When the vesicle enlargement is not enough to push at the nucleus of the cell.

NOS Score: A score given, out of eight, to show how diseased a liver is. There are three different factors to consider when assigning a score, which I'm not going to go into detail on. (Mostly because I don't know much about them.) The higher the score, the worse the patient's liver.

After a while I was told to go meet with Dr. Dora Lam-Himlin of the pathology department to help with whatever she required. Upon arriving I was presented with arguably the most interesting task known to humankind. Organizing files.

I kid, I kid, it wasn't that boring, I did in fact get to use software exclusive to pathology medical professionals. (Edit: for some reason these two paragraphs have a white highlight on them and I can't get it off >.< )

This actually happened. Multiple times.

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The Awkward Moment Heard 'Round the World

At, 11:30 on Tuesday, as I always do, I asked Christine if there were any lectures I could attend. She responded affirmative, adding that today's lecture host had set up free lunch. If wasn't interested then, I certainly was now. Apparently, the host was also a professor at Harvard.

The fact that he is quite the recognized lecturer from across the country is secondary.
Now where are the forks?

Ok, so here's where I should explain things before I delve into hilarity. The room where lectures are usually held has a television which is a live video feed to another room somewhere else entirely, so that, with one lecturer, two rooms can listen in.

So I walked in, and there was no one else in the room. Strange. I then noticed the buffet of food next to me and walked over to get some. And by some, I mean A LOT. See, I hadn't eaten since 4:00 PM yesterday, so I was ravenous. I took 5 burrito wraps of which I'm sure most reasonable people would have taken one or two, And so on for the rest of the food. After that, I sat down, and suddenly realized that the live video feed was rolling. Taking a look at it, I found at least 15 people, all dressed in suits, staring at me from the other side, including the lecturer. I meanwhile, was wearing casual clothing, had forgotten my clinic badge to prove I was an employee, and had half a veggie wrap stuffed in my mouth. Not to mention there was still no one else in our room. Yep.

We stared at each other for a soul-crushing five seconds before I just sat down and continued to awkwardly eat. And then (of course) other people started walking into our room.

The actual lecture was quite interesting and easy (relatively) to follow, mainly concerning recent and future technological advances in the fight against obesity, diabetes, and cancer. Many memorable concepts, all with working prototypes located elsewhere, were introduced. One was a chemical that induced neutrophils (the first cells to intercept foreign matter entering the body) to act faster than they normally would. For some reason I was unable to comprehend, the chemical was more effective on those with conditions surrounding obesity. Another technology talked about was what's known as "biomaterial gels". These can be inserted into the human body without being too intrusive, and can release both radiation and chemicals at predetermined times or constant rates, depending upon what is necessary. This would have huge implications for patients, for example, patients needing chemotherapy could do it themselves at home, without the aid of a ridiculous amount of machinery. I was stunned by the progress being made, especially since our lecturer said these could be in place for everyday use by 2025.

it was pretty next level

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Oh Rochester
A patient's MRN is their eight digit identifying number. These were used back when Rochester was the location of the only Mayo Clinic. However, when Mayo expanded to places such as Arizona, the Rochester people decided they should tack an extra number at the end of every MRN, to be called the "check number", due to the staggering number of new patients Mayo was treating. However, the first number of every MRN was and still is 0. Christine and I wondered why they didn't just decide to use that seemingly useless number. After heated debate, we came to the conclusion that the entire Rochester branch was probably just stupid. Yep.

Unrelated, but one of our lab members has been to Rochester several times, and
he told me weather horror stories today. XD

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Drone
Apparently we now have a drone? That's what I've been told anyway. I have no idea why we need it, but apparently, a few people were taking pictures with it in a small conference room or something. Isn't it dangerous to operate those things in cramped places? Oh well, all I know is, I wanna take it for a test spin. ;)

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Seniority
So we got a new guy in our lab this week! Since the badges for new employees always take a few weeks to print off, every time he wants to get into a place requiring badge clearance, I should go with him because I have a badge. Dang, I feel important.