Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Of two things in this world am I certain: I am in love with Physiology, and Histology is the bane of my short existence. The former is beautiful, elegant, and sexy. Take the simple act of shaking hands with another human being. At first touch, instantly in both individuals there is a depolarization in the membranes of nerve axons as a threshold is broken, penetrated. Sodium ions pour through voltage-gated channels, the chain reaction initiated and there is no turning back. The nerves are insulated so the signal can run faster and faster, rushing, coursing through your very fingers, hand, arm, destined for the brain. The signal swiftly reaches your parietal lobe, and all is finally clear and lucid. You feel the touch, the pressure, the warmth of that hand in yours. Then your frontal lobe becomes engorged from stimulation and kicks into gear, filled in with the emotion, love, and joy of the moment. It decides expertly to convey these sensations to your counterpart, and the depolarizations begin again in the opposition direction, climaxing in the neuromuscular junctions of your flaccid hand, acetylcholine exploding into the synaptic cleft. SNARE proteins pull the vesicles roughly into the postsynaptic cell membrane and rip it in two, spreading the phospholipid bilayer apart as thousands of neurotransmitters enter. The result is the gentle contraction of your hand muscles in the palm of the other, and a connection has been made as the two of you unite. Bliss.

On the other hand (figuratively now, the analogy is over – stop fantasizing), there is Histology. Histology reminds me of Art Appreciation class in high school, specifically trying to appreciate art that wasn’t art. Picasso, van Gogh, Renior, now that is art. Histology pictures look like those “paintings” that are really just canvases splashed with tubs of paint – essentially expensive multicolor paper that 2nd graders have the dexterity and unique ability to create. This “art” deserves to be on the refrigerator door, not in galleries that only sell five-figure-plus creations. The digital pictures I look at have blobs, striations, more blobs, more striations, and stupid little folds in pink and blue. All of it is smeared together at a magnification that a sperm could not interpret without a magnifying glass. And through this chaos we have to pick out mitochondria, endothelium, intercalated disks, and actin filaments. As a big picture person, who relishes the importance of population trends and genetic drift in disease, nothing could be more lackluster. I even fell asleep in class, my FIRST slumber in any class ever, ever in my career as a student.

And so goes my day, from climax to ennui. Luckily Physiology has a 60/40 or maybe even a 70/30 edge on the bane of my existence, and it gives me much to look forward to this quarter. We will study every system in depth, briefly exposing what can go wrong, but saving most of the pathophysiology until next year. A human has to be healthy before he or she can become sick, so we’ll start with how it should be. This is the most clinically relevant course we’ve had to date, and I am positively giddy at the prospect of diagnosis.

Road trip back to DC for the weekend. Meg, Clodagh, Kelly, and I are spending some quality time with Mom and Pops and celebrating Chris and Tobes engagement tomorrow. Congrats!