So little time

It has been a week and a half since my last post! I just have no time during freshers! But it's over now, time to get into actual work. And I'm really excited.

At the start of the course I was terrified of hating medicine, even after all the work and suffering to get in to the thing. You see, everyone on the course is passionate about medicine as a clinical profession. Except me. My real love is science.

After getting a little stuck in, and seeing my mum as a carer today, I think I may start to like the health profession in its more traditional sense. Until then however, I'll still clutch to my hope of academia.

Course aside, Uni is fucking brilliant. New and old friends, clubs joined, fresh starts. I really want to get stuck in!

And lastly for David, who started today: medishuuuuuuuuunnnnnn

I am finally here!

I've finally got the oppurtunity to sit down and blog! Every night since arriving here in Queens I've been so tiried i just slept, I'm in 9-5 everyday! Most people have no more than 10 hours a week!

But so far it has been fun, I'm very excited. The Med-School is awesome, the people are awesome and the accomodation is... ok. The folk on my floor are wonderfully amiable, but it's shared sanitaries. I was supposed to get en suite...

Today we did a First Aid course, it was fun if not a bit tedious. I've done it all before, it was like revision. The manager of the instructors however was wearing one of those copper bracelets. The ones that "rectify your aura" and "resonates with your natural frequency." And he's a qualified medic. Oh dear.

University plans

I'm pretty sure of my position for university now. I've firmed by genetics offer at QUB, so I'll probably be doing that course. I do know however that I'm on the medicine reserve list, of about 30 people. From my results I'm estimating I'm around 20-25, luckily my A* in chemistry gives me an edge. According to the admissions office last year the last offer went to someone with A*AAA (like me!) the second day of term.

You never know, I might still get in. But I'm happy enough with genetics and just want to get started now. Dammit, hurry up and end, summer!

First synthetic organ transplant

Yay! First post with actual content! I felt this was worth sharing.

Surgeons in Sweden have just confirmed the first successful transplant of a lab-grown human organ. The organ in question was a trachea (the windpipe leading to your lungs).

Scientists from London literally sculpted trachea tissue into an exact copy of the patient's from 3D scans, with two more airways budding off it. Once it reached Sweden it was bathed in the patients' stem cells.

And that is what made it so brilliant, the trachea was transformed by the stem cells into the patient's own tissue! No donor and no risk of rejection! Reportedly, the patient is recovering well and there weren't any post-surgery complications.

This is pioneering work, just think of all the good that could come from work like this. Need a kidney? A safe one gets grown for you. Lost loads of blood? No problem, we have whole vats of O negative.

Now if only religious folk would back off from stem cell research with their half-baked world views. I've meet people opposed to the idea of such research at all, regardless of where the cells are sourced. It's just too taboo, apparently. Don't they know most research currently involves animal cells? I was unaware the rights of an unborn rat was more important than human welfare.

And so ends my first real blog entry. I suppose I'm now one of those pretentious internet twats now, right?