From seattlepi.com: Oscar the cat predicts patients' deaths

Oscar the cat predicts patients' deaths
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack
for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by
curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy,
observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members
once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than
four hours to live.

* Read the full article at:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1120AP_Death_Cat.html

Riding the bus

So some people on the bus today were talking about work. Apparently a cat in the Nursing Home lays down with some of the residents, and then shortly after they will die. Kind of freaky... but then how sick are the people in the nursing home? and what if the cat is carrying some sort of illness? Cats have always been cast as supernatural in ways... so it is easy to imagine some bad sign. I just know I wouldnt be letting that cat near me!

Speaking of riding the bus. One of our attendings had an interesting way of comparing neoplasia in Epithelial vs. Stromal vs. Hematopoetic cell lines. Think of Epithelial neoplasia as a teenager stuck in a house, and a metastasis is when they sneak out. You can tell that they sneak out because they get dirt on their shoes, their jacket gets wet (hey, its Seattle).... Stromal neoplasia is like a teenager who lives outside the house. Their shoes are always dirty..so you have to look at other features to determine if they are metastatic. Hematopoetic neoplasia is like a teenager who lives on a bus. They are always out and about and can go wherever they want. (Thus you dont usually call a lymphoma metastatic, because that is a given.)

Not a med student anymore

I got real comfortable calling myself Doctor today. My beeper and phone were going like crazy all morning. Doctor LaPointe is much quicker than First year Pathology resident. Anyhow, I probably should change the title of my blog, or should I? I want to keep this up as a site that Med students (especially at UND) can turn to, but I also want to share my experiences...

So, today was day 2 of my program officially starting. We have a few hours of training in the morning (like how to use the computer system, dictation, blah blah..) Then start getting and looking at slides for the day. I'm doing GI and Liver right now. It is very interesting. UW has a big transplant service and I have seen a lot of liver biopsies to evaluate for rejection. Today however I diagnosed my first patient with cancer. Delivering bad news. They gave us sample cases in med school. They test us on it. And even though I dont have to look the person in the face, there is still quite an impact. Okay so this is something that is going to become routine but I hope that (unlike some pathologists I interacted with on the interview trail) I never lose the human touch. That calling a cancer really is a heavy thing to do, no matter how obvious the pattern of cells under the microscope.

One last thing is I am a little torn about the jokes about how the only patients the Pathologists see are dead... I think they are pretty funny myself, but the fact of the matter is that at this institution alone they see over 30,000 cases of tissue samples from LIVING people. Autopies are part of the picture, but only a small piece of what Pathologists actually do. I still think the jokes are funny though...