miss akay

Clinical apprenticeship in Chinatown.

Today, I met my mentor who I will be working with for the next three years. He's a very nice doc in internal medicine. Today we saw half a dozen patients, with maladies from bronchitus, backpain, GI pain, dementia, runny nose and basic blood work. Dr. Lee was extremely thoughtful to his patients and also to me. He invited me to listen to the lungs of the patient with the runny nose. I got to palpate a woman's abdomen, who had an unusal mass inside. Anyway, he should be a great doctor to work with. I like the location, too. I also like the fact that a good proportion of his patients are Chinese. It reminds me of San Francisco. Philadelphia and DC don't have a large Chinese population, like SF and I miss them. Very sweet people... and they always wear really cute socks! Remember the old woman I blogged about two years ago, who was wearing the playboy bunny socks? Adorable! Our patient, today with dementia had yellow Hello Kitty socks. Even Dr. Lee commented how cute she was! I think I'll like this part of school. Is there any part that I don't like, so far? Not really! I must say that med school is pretty great. I love it!

Other than my preceptorship, I learned about the muscle that causes goosebumps. It is a tiny little smooth muscle, called the arrector pilli. It is responsible for causing the follicle and hair to become more perpendicular to the surface of the skin, and causing the follicle to protrude slightly above the surrounding skin... TaDa! Goosebumps

Additionally (Stef and Amanda... this one's for you!)... do you remember when we were in Van Pelt library discussing the production of sperm? Because women produce one ovum every month that we give off through menses, men produce a gazillion more gametes everyday... so what happens to these "extra" players? Someone at our study table thought that was why men had wet dreams. That it was to get rid of the extra sperm. Well, I learned this week for a fact (in our lecture on epithelial cells) that the really long branched microvilli called stereocilia, that are inside the male tract, are responsible for absorbing fluid. Their main role is to suck up the extra sperm! I think the big joke last year was that I would go off to medical school and learn the mechanism, to answer our late-semester study-session procrastination ponderances and report back to everyone else with an answer. Well, now you know! It is all about the STEREOCILIA, baby! If they didn't exist, I imagine that wet dreams would occur much, much more frequently.

posted by miss akay @ 10:11 PM