Week 5 - Mary Clare

The theme of this past week was MRI. I spent two nights in the MRI facilities with Dr. Prince as a subject for Amanda’s dehydration studies. I think that one of my missing links for the summer was learning more about diagnostic procedures, so it was great to work with Amanda and Dr. Prince reviewing the images and helping to set up new ones. One of the nights, I got to go and get my shoulder scanned. Since high school I have had shoulder joint laxity and chronic dislocations. The scans were able to show some of the damage in my shoulder due to dislocation. What was especially cool about getting my shoulder scanned was that I was able to compare it to some of the clinical experiences I am having shadowing a shoulder and knee specialist. Being able to see what a normal dislocated shoulder looks like and compare with what I see with Dr. Rodeo’s patients helps bring to light even more why it is necessary for them to receive the surgeries he recommends.

On Wednesday, I spent the morning at rounds for obstetrics (OB), shadowing a little in the wing and seeing a caesarian. The shadowing experience was by far my least favorite experience to date. The clinical portion was interesting and educational, however the social aspect was extremely uncomfortable. On the socially awkward and social butterfly scale, I normally consider myself somewhere in the middle. However in this wing I felt myself severely on the socially awkward side. In order to get in to watch a live birth you had to track down the doctors and nurses you didn’t know and then most awkward of all, introduce yourself to a women who is 2-5 mm dilated.  Bare in mind this woman is usually pretty angry at your presence before you open your mouth. Therefore it’s needless to say that I have no plans to return to this wing anytime in the near future.

The remainder of my week was spent in the Laboratory for Soft Tissue Research. Over the past couple of weeks we have been trying to isolate and characterize RNA from juvenile and mature meniscus. We have been encountering some problems getting pure enough RNA since the meniscus has a high protein to cell ratio. Also, we have found that the housekeeping genes follow a linear tend of expression between the outer, middle, and inner zones.  Since this is necessary reported in the literature, we have been doing a couple different tests to see if this is truly our data or error in the PCR. However now that we have a good idea of what is going on with the RNA, we are ready to proceed with my experiment and hopefully get some solid data before I leave.