Happy Wednesday! Another week is halfway over. This week we had a bit of a messy schedule. Some of you may have heard of the job action that took place on Tuesday. There was picketing in a few of the buildings on the BCIT Burnaby campus, including SW1, which is where the med lab program is located. So basically on Tuesday classes were cancelled in these buildings, and as a result we didn’t have our labs. This resulted in a bunch of complications with our schedule, which was unfortunate because it’s hard to make up for the lost time. But the good news is (for my set at least) we get to finish at 2:30 for 3 days this week! Spare blocks are hard to come by, so they’re always welcome since we never seem to have enough time to finish everything!
So last week I started talking about some of the disciplines in med lab, and I’d like to finish it off in this post. Here are the other three:
Clinical Microbiology – Here we learn all about the bacteria (and some fungi and viruses) that are clinically significant. For example, we learned all about E. coli and Salmonella, which can cause food poisoning (as well as many other conditions). I won’t lie, there is a lot to learn, especially if you think about how many different species of microorganisms there are out there. But it turns out the ones that typically cause harm to people are only a small percentage (relatively speaking). In the labs we get trained to recognize how these microbes look on the agar plates as well as under the microscope, and next term we will learn more about how to treat infections, i.e. which antibiotics to use and when to use them. This is one of my favourite labs because it’s like playing detective. I’ve written about microbiology labs before so check it out if you haven’t already.
Hematology – This is where we get to work with blood and examine the cells to detect blood disorders such as anemia. We learned all about red cells, white cells, and platelets, including every possible abnormality. You can detect abnormalities through the number of cells present in a patient’s blood sample, as well as through the size, shape, and colour. Nowadays the lab relies a lot on automation (because who wants to manually count millions of red blood cells?) – but technologists are still needed to analyze/confirm the computer results and detect things that the instrument may have missed. To do this, we simply make blood smears on glass slides and look at them using a good ol’ light microscope. There’s more to it – but these are the things I’ve learned so far.
Molecular Diagnostics – This is a relatively newcomer to med lab. Here we work with DNA to diagnose patients at the genetic level, and since DNA differs from person to person, this allows a more tailored treatment for patients as well, i.e. personalized medicine. Molecular is not really a field of its own out at the hospital labs – it can be applied to other areas of med lab. For example, it can be used in microbiology to identify bacteria when the regular microbiology tests aren’t specific enough. Not all labs have implemented molecular diagnostics, but it is increasingly more common. This is another discipline that I’m excited about, given my background in molecular biology.
So that’s med lab in a nutshell! This is cheesy but summarizing med lab in these blog posts helped remind me of why I chose this field in the first place. I love being able to apply my knowledge to help diagnose patients; it is a lot like detective work and we have to use clues to solve problems because sometimes diseases don’t always show their signs and symptoms and we have to dig deeper. I’m a mystery buff (Sherlock Holmes, anyone?) and med lab is my way of channelling that inner detective!