Application of Knowledge!

Histamine releasing from mast cells.

While walking with one of the medical students today we started discussing the burgeoning allergy season. Last week (or maybe earlier this week?) we learned about inflammation in the body, including Type 1 hypersensitivity reactions like allergies. She mentioned that she's starting to have allergies in NC, but she didn't have them the last time she lived in NC. But since sensitization occurs through exposure, it makes sense that she's developing allergies now that she's being reexposed the antigens. Success! We manged to apply some knowledge imparted to us through streaming lectures to real life scenarios. :-D

Also, and I know that googling symptoms to self-diagnose is a huge irritant for physicians, but I have to say that our success rate is pretty high with google assistance. Of course, in real life with a given set of symptoms you probably just have a virus but in hypothetical case studies the more exciting results are the way to go.

Actual life is much more like discussing allergies than it is discovering a retrovirus that may have a causative link to cancer, in case you were wondering. :-)

My beautiful boy in my former living room. <3

In completely unrelated news, my husband had my dog shaved today. It is silly how missing small things like that make me sad but the picking up and moving to a different state isn't an issue at all. I'm not a huge fan of being apart from half of my family but most of the time I try not to think about it. My mom is heavily suggesting that the kids spend the summer with her, five hours away. I still have a couple months to figure it out, but I don't like the idea of them being that far apart from me for that long. It would mean driving 10 hours round trip every non-test weekend for a couple months just for the chance to spend a day with them. Right now, it just sounds like a super way to make things more stressful than they need to be. We'll have to figure it out so they can get some time with their Lola/my dad can spend more time at home but they're not gone the entire summer.