Vet Times

Tag: Clinical pathology

  • Time enough at last

    Time enough at last

    —

    by

    I left general practice – a job I felt was ultimately, and quite literally, killing me – after nearly two decades, and began a career in clinical pathology four years ago. Some residency (training) programmes are three years, but ours is a commercial lab so it takes a little longer. I have been building toward…

  • Loss (reprise)

    Loss (reprise)

    —

    by

    My father-in-law was the type of gentleman they don’t make any more. He was a far calmer, kinder, friendlier and gentler man than it is within my nature to be. Although he was her stepfather, he was far more of a dad to my wife than the previous incumbent. He was the kind of grandfather…

  • The wonder of cells

    The wonder of cells

    —

    by

    Since starting a career in clinical pathology, I have seen a lot of strange and wonderful sights down my microscope… It’s like being given a window into weird new worlds – tiny battlegrounds of leukocytes, tumour cells and microorganisms, against a backdrop of cytokines, stroma and necrosis. It’s not quite Saving Private Ryan, but with…

  • Cytology tips: cellularity

    Cytology tips: cellularity

    —

    by

    “Cellularity is poor, and preservation is poor.” As openings to literary works go, it may not have the skill of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” or “The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel”, but it certainly has an emotional…

  • Cytology tips: preservation

    Cytology tips: preservation

    —

    by

    There’s a part of me that’s constantly surprised cytology works at all. The idea you can suck up a few cells from a patient, squirt them on to a slide, stain them and – by looking at the shape of the cells and how they relate to one another – work out what is happening…

  • General practice: a boring job?

    General practice: a boring job?

    —

    by

    I have, on occasion throughout my career, heard people describe general practice as “boring”. “Sure,” they’d say. “There’s stressful bits, but so much of it is the same – anal glands, vaccinations – it just gets boring after a while, doesn’t it?” My first reaction to this viewpoint has always been a double take and…

  • Emotional stress

    Emotional stress

    —

    by

    I nearly didn’t go… I was locuming at the time and  been away from home a lot. I’d also been working nights – the first time I had tried solely out-of-hours work – and it had been punishing. Why, then, was I coming to shadow a pathologist for a day in a veterinary laboratory? When…

  • Millennium baby

    Millennium baby

    —

    by

    I qualified in 1999 and, because I drew the short straw and was a new graduate, I saw in the millennium with a friendly little Yorkshire terrier as it recovered from a seizure. I’ve spent New Years’ in worse company. Although the idea seems almost inconceivable to me, 1999 was actually a long time ago…

  • Two things you probably already knew about pathologists (but I didn’t)

    Two things you probably already knew about pathologists (but I didn’t)

    —

    by

    A few years ago, after spending a decade and a half in general practice and possibly inspired by watching a lot of Quincy, M.E. – when I was too young to know any better (incidentally, does anyone know how old we have to get before we do know better about things? I’d like to be…

  • Testing times: reliving the exam nightmare

    Testing times: reliving the exam nightmare

    —

    by

    Remind me why I’m doing this? I swore I’d never put myself through it again. Amid the bittersweet feelings at the end of my veterinary degree – sadness I’d never pass time in quite the same way with many of my fellow students again, nervousness about a suddenly unplanned future (I’d known exactly what I…