Gross But Interesting Day

I just figured out how to fix my blog.  But last week was a little bit boring, but interesting. I saw bronchoscopes and colonoscopies, and also a few heart echos.  A heart echo is like an ultrasound, but for your heart.  Most of the patients who received these were in-patient patients.  A lot of them were sad cases because they were really old, or had had a stroke or heart attack and probably won't ever recover.  This week I'm in the NICU, the neonatal intensive care unit.  It's really interesting, the babies are so tiny. I'm not really allowed to talk about any of them in particular, but they are really cute and a lot of them are doing really well.  I'm following Dr. Martin, an attending here.  Hopefully next week I'll be able to follow a nurse so that I can watch what each job is involved in.  Right now I'm sitting in his office because he's in a meeting.  Earlier today I did rounds with him, and then I went upstairs to the lab.  In the lab, I watched one of the researchers put a 7-day old rat pup to sleep, and then remove its brain.  It was hard to watch, but actually interesting.  The rat pup had gone through an oxygen testing system for it's 7 day life.  The mother and all of her rat pups stay in this cage that is put into a little machine that regulates oxygen levels.  Every five minutes the oxygen is dropped to 5% (we usually breath 21%) and then is brought back up to a normal level.  This is to simulate what a new born baby goes through during birth.  The one rat pup that we worked with was put into a small canister and its breathing was monitored.  After twenty minutes, the rat pup had settled and then oxygen was pumped in and out of the canister, also to simulate a humans birth.  The researcher then brought the rat pup over to a sterilized section of the lab where she pumped saline solution into its heart.  After all of the blood was drained out, some solution was pumped in to make the rat pups muscles contract and become very stiff.  This allowed her to cut its skull open and remove its brain.  That was what I watched this morning, and in about an hour we're going to do it all over again.