Well, the semester has finally come to an end for me. Mike still has one final to take tomorrow morning. I whipped all three of mine out today! Talk about brain overload... Ever seen gray matter? Well I did, today after my last final. Haha. Anyway... I just wanted to share some pictures of my nerdiness.
This is me, proudly holding the poster I won in my Microbiology class. Notice it says "fecal," not "France." Every year for the 2nd year students, they do what they call "Fecal Fest." The students are expected to go out into nature and collect a FRESH fecal sample. The goal is to acquire a fecal sample with parasites in it. The more parasites, the better. Unfortunately I didn't have Mike take pictures of me digging in mine so you'll just have to imagine. First we trudged through dirt and mud to some wild geese. After they flew off we walked around trying to find a fresh sample, while also trying not to step in any. Finally we found a nice juicy one so Mike stood and watched as I tried to scoop some up with the spork that came with my container. Haha if only I had pictures it would be a lot better! At school the next day in lab I was able to process my sample, preparing it to be looked at under the microscope. Unfortunately, my sample contained absolutely NO parasites, although a couple things were suspicious but my teacher wouldn't pass them off. After everyone who did find parasites were awarded their sought after buttons :) there were still some posters left over. So those of us who wanted one just had to send our story of collecting our sample and our teacher would choose the best. Apparently people either didn't want a poster, or didn't have very interesting stories at all because that's how I won my poster. Here's a close up of it.
You can't read it very well but what would be the names of the cities or destinations in France are actually names of different parasites. The coolest parasite we learned about, I may be a little partial, was of the genus Leishmania. There are a few different species, tropica, brasiliensis and donovani, and they cause skin lesions and problems with your inner organs. I also have a picture of it.
This is a stuffed animal representation if Leishmania tropica. One of my friends in my program at school gave it to me. There's a web site where you can buy stuffed animal bacteria and blood cells and all sorts of cool stuff like that.
Anyway, you don't need to worry about becoming infected with L. tropica unless you travel to tropical areas such as South America or the Middle East. And if you do go there, try not to get bit by any mosquitoes or sand flies, because you could get so many different diseases from them. Around here we just have to worry about Giardia lamblia, and Ascaris lumbricoides, a parasite and worm, respectively.
Well, this was just a little bit of what I learn about in my program at school. We are all nerds, but its pretty interesting stuff. You'll be thankful there are those of us who love this when you go to the doctor to get any bit of blood work or urine testing done because I'll be the one back in the lab looking at it and telling the doctor what I find so he/she can tell you what it wrong with you. And trust me, if you're needing work done, you'll want the right answers as soon as you can get them!
Also just to wrap up my semester, my program had a pretty fun end-of-year party today. We may be nerds, but we also know how to have fun! There was food (which is always in the recipe for a fun party), Dance-Dance Revolution Kinex style, Rock Band, Karyoke, Darts and Been Bag Toss. There were prizes awarded to the highest score in all the games then an audience vote for best karyoke. I held the high score in dance dance for a couple songs, then Courtney had to come along with her Canadian skills and beat me. Then I helped my friends Natalie and husband Brian win the Karyoke by screaming and clapping way loud. They were awesome singing Evanescence Bring Me to Life. All in all it was a great end to the semester. I kind of did things backwards because I went to the party, then took my finals... But it all worked out because I passed them all!
Hello Summer!
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