One of my favourites during my psych nursing career was the exact opposite - not strange or interesting at all but made me look good. We where sitting around in a staff meeting discussing the patients and conversation turned to a new patient who suffered temporal lobe epilepsy that caused him to fly into violent rages and attack people. I picked up his file and flicked through it while the staff discussed how tragic his case was and how carefully he had to be handled.
I remarked that for supposedly uncontrollable rages he had been very lucky in his choice of victims. He had all his uncontrollable rages while in the company of women except on the two occasions he had been uncontrollable with male members of the clergy. I said that it seemed fortuitous that whenever he was hospitalised he raged against female patients and female staff never against psychotic males or male staff members who would be well equipped to deal with him.
It turned out that the diagnosis had been maintained for years as a family fiction to explain his behaviour although after the initial “possible” diagnosis no physical confirmation was sought. He was really suffering from a mundane personality disorder.
I saw a cocker spaniel that, while not strange, was very funny. The dog was a 4 month old cocker presented by a couple for exam and vaccines. On physical exam I noted that the dog was a hermaphrodite/pseudohermaphrodite (not all that rare in the breed). In pointing out the abnormalities, I noted that the dog had a huge clitoris. The man said, “what’s a clitoris?”. His wife looked at me and rolled her eyes and smirked, as if to say, “poor, poor, pitiful me.”.
While I was working at the local Humane Society, one of the kennel workers brought in a dog that had recently been abandoned at the shelter. (Some people wouldn’t bother to wait for someone to be there to accept the animal -we would often arrive at 6:30am to find a dog tied to the fence or a box of kittens. Once some asshat even put a full-grown lab mix into the shed we had outside clearly marked “Newspaper Only”. I’m really glad someone was scheduled to open the box that day.) She held up the dog for my inspection and asked “Is this a boy dog or a girl dog?” I replied “Yes”.
The dog had other health issues and was eventually sent to Auburn University, where I am sure the poor thing became a teaching aid.
A local shelter posted a sign with this statute, along with three dummy video cameras (complete with cables that were stuck into the soil) and they haven’t had an abandoned animal since.
I should specify that talking about the inner workings of eyes and hearts squicks me out. It doesn’t bother me to talk about the system as a whole working.
He should offer the Energizer (or Duracell, or whatever) the folks to use that story in their adverts. “The battery that keeps going, and going, and going… and that’s why the Energizer Bunny is soooooooo happy”
I know this isn’t GQ so there’s no real need for me to be so anal, but I’m not sure either of these definitions is completely accurate or helpful.
If the blood looks like cream of tomato soup or a strawberry shake (hmmm good!), the problem is NOT too much cholesterol. Rather, the fatty appearance is due to very high levels of triglycerides. The causes and consequences of high triglyceride levels are different from those of high cholesterol. In particular, if your triglyceride levels are so high that your blood looks milky, you run the very real risk of developing pancreatitis - a very painful, sometimes lethal, condition.
Hemolysis in a blood sample is most likely due to a problem with the taking or storage of the sample, leading to break down of the red blood cells. If, however, the hemolysis (breakdown) has actually taken place within the bloodstream, before the sample was drawn, then, and only then, are you talking about so-called hemolytic anemia (of which there are many causes, ranging from the totally benign to life-threatening).
BTW, in a patient who simultaneously has high triglycerides and hemolysis, I’d wonder about Zieve’s Syndrome.
So, cerberus, a simple google search is often not too helpful for medical symptoms and can actually be quite misleading.
In regular school in UK umpteen years ago we had to disect a cow’s eyeball as part of normal Biology lessons. The smell was obnoxious (I guess they were pre-pickled or something).
Heck, in biology in grade 12 (in Canada) I had to dissect cow brains - serious formaldyhide stench.
At the end of that class session, we were supposed to throw the dissected brains away into a big garbage can. Instead, we threw them out the window at the “stoner’s corner” below - to shouts of “oh man, it’s raining brains!”
My brother did a sheep’s eyeball in high school bio, and some evil being slipped one into his pocket, too. Due to schedule oddities (we moved partway through high school), I never did high school bio; when I did it in cegep, it was fetal pigs.
We got to dissect rats. They came in sealed plastic bags of formalin. They smelt foul, looked yellowish and odd and were frozen into odd rigor mortis poses so you had to break limbs to pin them to the board.
I was not fond of my boil-in-the-bag rat, and we were envious of the kids who’d registered as conscientous objectors - they got to dissect a daffodil.
However, my mother had a much more interesting experience at her school, which was a big outfit on the edge of Glasgow, back in the sixties. Their head of biology came up with a cunning plan to save money on purchasing rats for dissection. When the time came for dishing out specimens, he produced several buckets and went round the class dishing them out. A few kids got rats, some got baby rabbits, many got kittens, a few got puppies.
Yes, he’d gone down to the local animal charity place and asked them to pickle anything they put down within a certain size range in order to help with the kids education. :eek:
It was apparently not a good scene AT ALL. There was much crying, howls of disgust and refusal to wield the scalpel. Some children recognised ‘specimens’ and their parents had to explain exactly which ‘good home’ they had sent kittens/puppies to. Angry letters were written, petitions circulated and classes boycotted.Rats returned to the menu very quickly, so to speak.
