honeycomb lung

There was one question from Semester 3 exam that I still remember until today. The question asks to describe 'honeycomb lung'. Most of us could not remember learning about 'honeycomb lung'. Apparently the answer was based on 2-3 slides and we need to listen to the explanation given by the lecturer. The question worth 10 marks and I tried my best to answer the question even though I hardly remember anything from the lecture.

My current rotation which is heart and lung reminds me of this unanswered question.

There are many lung diseases that will eventually end up in the same appearance during post-mortem. Honeycomb lung refers to the end stage of various diseases. There is even mnemonic for this term.

Histiocytosis X
Occupational disease (pneumoconiosis, farmer's lung)
NEurofibromatosis
(Y)idiopathic
COllagen vascular disease
Medicines
Bronchiectasis
Sarcoid

This is how honeycomb lung looks like. Pathologist ie the doctors that look cells under the microscope and do post-mortem have a tendency to associate food with dead human tissues.

Picture taken from Pathology of Pulmonary Interstitial Disease.

nice numbers

It took almost 4 years to reach 20202 visits to this blog and the number of posts have been spiralling down since 2006. The decreasing number of posts reflects that I might be too busy with study or having writer's block or holiday :)

academic transcript

I've received my academic transcript from my university today. It shows my mark from the last four years since first semester. Overall, my mark was not stable and it may reflect the way I prepared for the semester exam. Sometimes, I study too much and beyond the scope of the semester, and sometimes I think I study too little. Perhaps I need to be a bit more exam-oriented after this. I have to strive harder to reach good final marks by the end of next year.

On another matter, today's weather was quite hot and I need to switch off my laptop to cool down it a bit. Fortunately, tomorrow weather forecast will be showers. Hopefully it will bring down the temperature around Melbourne.

timetable

The first week was busy. I leave home usually around 8am and come back from the hospital around 7pm. The hospital is a bit further from the previous hospital and the journey take around 45 minutes in the morning due to traffic jam and will take around 30 minutes if the traffic is good.

The timetable was full and sometimes I only could get half an hour lunch break. I guess there are lots of thing need to be learned in this rotation. That means my weekend will be full with revising the current rotation plus studying the previous semester.

I wonder if I'm able to update this blog as often as I could. Perhaps I need to start writing short post instead of long post...

less than two years

That is the length of time before my graduation, provided that I pass every semester. Whenever I told my grandpa, uncle and aunties that I would finish my study by the end of next year, they would be surprised.

Time seems quite short indeed. Since finishing my high school way back in 2000, I have studied medicine plus International Baccalaureate for almost 8 years. Most of my friends from high school are already working and earning income.

Anyway, my next rotation would be cardio-respiratory, that is heart and lungs. Hopefully I will master the skill of interpreting ECG and interpreting the heart sounds by the end of this block. This is an important skill and will be used again and again in the future.

Ok, that's for now...have to prepare for tomorrow.

candid syndrome

In December, my cousin, Nadiah gets married and the official photographer is from Candid Syndrome. I've followed the journey of Saiful Nang, the main person behind Candid Syndrome for a few years now. He and his members are very talented in taking beautiful wedding pictures.

Here is the link to the pictures of the wedding if you would like to see. There were many pictures of my cousins and relatives captured by the photographer.

Nadiah and Khairul, JB.

organize

Quite busy within the last few days. There are few things that need to be settled before the new semester starts.

First of all is to organize my room and medical notes. There were lot of notes that is not useful to me now, so I decided to put those in the recycle bins. Yet, after all of those cleaning, there are still lot of notes left. Fortunately I have arranged this note previously in big folders.

Next is to reorganize the structure of folders in my laptop. There were literally thousands of files and folders in My Document. Some of those were from my days back in Kolej Mara Banting. Since I'm not sure whether I should delete it or not, I decided to compress all those old notes in Winzip. At least, that will save some space in my hard disk. By the time I'm writing this post, I still have not finished arranging the folders in the hard disk. Perhaps I should do that later :).

To keep up-to-date with blogs and news, I use Google Reader to collect all feeds from various websites and blogs. Now, I hardly check my Google Reader in the last 2 months. There are thousands of unread feed in Google Reader and I am halfway of clearing those unread feeds. Hopefully, I will be able to finish clearing the feeds within few days.

Back in Melbourne

The flight took about 7 hours 20 minutes and there were several turbulences throughout the flight. Overall, the holiday in Malaysia was refreshing and enjoyable. There were many weddings that I attend to and the food was as delicious as usual.

Now, it is time for me to start reading medical books again. Semester 9 will start by next week.

I will be answering the comments by tonight. See you later