What I Learned (2)

Takotsubo Syndrome: Commonly referred to as Broken Heart Syndrome because it's a condition typcially precipitated by severe emotional stress, Takotsubo Syndrom is a sort of cardiomyopathy that is hard to detect on an EKG because it mimics the readings that would be expected of a STEMI (a type of heart attack - ST elevated myocardial infarction).

In Takotsubo Syndrome however, the left ventrical of the heart gets bent out of its proper shape. It's a (relatively) recent diagnosis, originally discovered by researchers in Japan (Takotsubo means octopus pot, a reference to traps used to catch the creatures and, in this case, the shape assumed by the deformed cardiac muscle), but is being seen somewhat more commonly in other countries now that people know about it. If the patient survives the initial attack, the condition is usually temporary and resolves itself over a period of several months.

I ran into a case of this. Very sad that the person had it of course, but I think the idea that you can actually get broken heart syndrome/die from a broken heart is really fascinating.

In other affairs, I've changed my MCAT study approach from trying to knock out my worse subject first (Physics), to trying to start with things I'm better at (Biology, and I'll do Gen. Chem after that). With the hard stuff first, I was making very slow progress. With slow progress I'd constantly see how much other material was left to cover, and I'd freak out even more, which would further slow my progress down until I "took a break" (read, stopped). The idea here is to simply knock out what I know I can knock out, and then do the hard stuff last (but hopefully still have over a month for it).

So far, this new approach has been going very well. I've gotten a lot of Biology review done in the last few days, and if I can keep it up things look to be going great. The biggest catch is to not get /too/ caught up in the details. It's a fine line - the MCAT expects me to know a lot about respiration, for example, but it doesn't expect me to know all the details of the proteins involved in the ETC, or all about ubiquinone, or every individual reaction that takes place in the Krebs Cycle. It's easy to get side tracked into trying to re-memorize all of that like you might have for a normal exam, but that's not a good use of time (and will put undue stress on you as well, because memorizing that many details isn't a simple task).

Anyways, I hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving if you're reading this (and if you're from the US). I had the day off and got to spend some time back home, which was nice. I'll post again later.

What I Learned (1)

Children get lots of ear infections. I know I used to as a young kid, and in general I've seen several people come in complaining of that lately. I never thought about it until a few weeks ago, but I realized that at "some" point I'd more or less stopped getting ear infections entirely. Why was that?

It turns out that children have smaller Eustachian tubes (little tubes linking the pharynx to the middle ear) in their ears than adults, and that the tubes are more level than in adults as well. These conditions combine to make it hard for fluid to drain from a child's ear - especially when the tube is partially filled with mucus or another substance. This creates an ideal condition for bacteria to be trapped, starting a middle ear infection (otitis media).

This isn't actually the first thing I've learned from my job, but it's the first thing that hit me as ::Oh! So that's why that happened!:: I think I'll try to put down future stuff on here occasionally that I find interesting. Especially since there's not too much else I can go on about without violating patient privacy laws or simply getting painfully repetitive.