Last Week at UPMC Presbyterian Autopsy

These three-week rotations sure do fly by fast. I would like to thank everyone working at the autopsy suite for showing me a different way of approaching the autopsy process. When and if I perform autopsies in the future, I'll be able to use the best methods that I've learned from both places.

The next place that I'll be heading off to is UPMC Children's Hospital. It will give me the chance to become exposed to some of the unfortunate pathologies that primarily occur during childhood. Once again, my time will be spent in the gross room and hopefully I will become more proficient and efficient in my grossings.

I have a small side project that I've been working on to assist me while I am grossing. The inspiration for this work came from my time spent at Allegheny General Hospital. They often have us students and other residents rotate through their gross laboratory and they have kindly prepared for us a dictation template for a wide variety of specimens that enter into the laboratory. The dictation templates offer a basic skeleton of a dictation and the dissector only needs to fill in the blanks and amend their dictation to suit the specimen. Having a template such as that is of great help for beginning PAs, but I would quickly like to move from using a template to being able to naturally say a dictation from memory and experience. To help me I've created a kind of a stepping stone. Instead of creating my own templates, I've merely printed my past dictations and encased them in plastic sheet covers. (Of course the personal identifying information has been removed.) The result thus far is a 30 or so page, easy-to-access booklet that will allow me to flip to some of my previous dictations to see what cassettes I need or how to describe a certain specimen.

Another problem that I sometimes come across while working on a dictation is how to describe something. Some specimens seem so 'out of this world' that one is at a loss for words. For example, if you were to see the following specimen, how would you describe it in words?

Picture taken from: http://radiographics.rsna.org/content/29/3/907/F51.expansion.html

Describing this would be a daunting task for beginning grossers and often I too admittedly have some trouble with descriptions. I spend far too much time finding what words to say and if I were to be able to smoothly say my descriptions, then I could easily cut my time down by 1/4 to 1/3. Interestingly enough, on Google, I have found a website from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centers Pathology Department that has literally hundreds of cases that provide gross pictures, microscopic pictures and their associated gross dictations, microscopic dictations and final diagnoses. This great resource can be found here:
http://path.upmc.edu/cases/index.html

I have been using this site as a practice guide. I love it and have been accessing it whenever I have some extra time. My eventual goal is to make a booklet of sample dictations and 4x6 color printouts. Who knows, if I can produce enough of my own dictations and pictures I might even be able to market it.

In one last bit of news, I'm happy to say that I've finally been able to get my total cholesterol down under 200 for the first time in my adult life! It's an important milestone for myself, so I figured I'd write it down for posterity when I look back on this blog in some years in the future. I had to drastically cut down my sugar and processed foods, increase my jogging to 20 minutes everyday and get more sunlight. Hopefully, this cholesterol reading was not a fluke and I'll be able to continue this healthy lifestyle for as long as I am able. In a few months time, if my cholesterol is still down, then I know that these changes are for real.