Nobody Likes Worms, Everybody Hates Worms, I'm Going Down The Garden To... Identify Helminths...

Several days of oppressive revision later, that niggling exam I mentioned in the last post is over, and about bloody (onions*) time, too. I realised I haven't actually mentioned the subject, so, for the sake of complete records (and for the title of this post to contain any remnants of sense) I should point out that it was Parasitology I, which focuses on helminths - parasitic worms like tapeworms and flukes.

I can say that I feel reasonably confident about the multiple choice section of the paper, since I did answer at least 20 out of the 50 without resorting to the process of elimination method. The practical, on the other hand, was more than a little annoying - the materials provided consisted of a selection of worms in petri dishes, some photos taken down a microscope, some photos of gross pathology (some of which were actually quite badly focused), and several "if yes go to 2, if no go to 3"-style identification keys, which were only useful to an extent e.g. as spelling aids.

There were, in fact, quite a few petri-dish worms that I could identify without much trouble, but you do tend to feel slightly short-changed when you're presented with diseased-state tissue sections on microscope slides and asked, "This was taken from a llama. What helminth is involved?"

I dealt with this feeling mostly by staring at the page for a few seconds with the Llama Song running through my head. Then, quite calmly, I looked at the slide again, decided I couldn't pick out anything diagnostic besides a slightly flattened worm in cross-section, had to assume that that was the relevant pathology, and made an educated guess. Well, that'll teach me to focus on understanding the principles I'm likely to need in practice. :P

Ah, Cambridge... training up the llama specialists of the future.

*"Bloody onions" refers to a very special email the Parasitology course organiser/lecturer sent us a few weeks back. I now can't use "bloody" as a swear word relating to parasites without immediately adding "onions" in my mind.

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Mammy visited over the weekend - this made revision slightly more hectic (e.g. getting up at 4am this morning to revise), but was worth it, since it's been three months since I last saw any of my family in person...

Since she's going to tell everyone anyway, I'll announce on here that one of the grads at James' birthday thought she was 26. And he was sober. And the light was fine. And I'm not very good at poking fun inoffensively immediately after getting out of bed.