We have finally made it to Thanksgiving break! I feel like this semester has flown by and
dragged on all at the same time! We had
an exam today in physiology on the GI system and it was A LOT of information
and I am happy to have it over with!
Last week was a busy week as well.
We had an exam in Surgical and Autopsy Procedures on Thursday. These exams are tough! They are different than any exam I have taken
before and they require a lot of thinking.
I also had my very last gross room rotation! It feels so weird to know
that I won’t be in the gross room again until I start clinical rotations in
January! We were pretty busy and I
grossed a lot of smaller specimens, but most of them were new specimens (to me)
so that was pretty neat!
Saturday, we had a frozen section practical. Michelle told us about this practical pretty
early during the first semester. A
frozen section is a means of providing an intraoperative diagnosis. There are many scenarios where the surgeon
needs to know the diagnosis of the specimen they are operating on. Depending on what the diagnosis is, it will
affect their actions.
For example: If a uterus is sent for a frozen with a
suspected endometrial tumor, we section through and submit a piece to determine
how far the tumor has invaded the muscle.
If the tumor has invaded more than 50% of the muscle, they will go in
and remove lymph nodes and soft tissue in order to properly stage the
cancer. If it has invaded less than 50%,
they won’t remove any additional tissue.
We select the tissue, freeze it onto a chuck, and cut a
section using a machine called a cryostat.
We put the section on a slide and stain it so the pathologist can look
at it under the microscope. In order to
do this well, it takes a lot of practice.
That is why we were told about it so early. There are two cryostats in the gross room and
we had to go after hours to practice throughout the year. I practiced a lot and I felt like I got
pretty darn good at it, then I went into the practical and I was so nervous and
I definitely did not perform to the best of my abilities, but I am hoping for
the best.
Below are a couple of pictures from the inside of the cryostat. There is a wheel on the outside we turn and it advances the tissue towards the blade and we have to get a good section of tissue without any wrinkles or folds onto a microscope slide. Sounds easy huh? With practice it isn't that hard, but I get extremely nervous when I am being evaluated and that ups the difficulty level up a lot!
I am so ready to enjoy this week off from classes and enjoy
time with my family and definitely eat some real yummy food. I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!
