Pre-examination blues...

Eeee..... Half an hour to the lab exam. My mind is suddenly blank. Gah. What if I can't tell the lupus slide from the diabetic renal glomerulosclerosis slide? What if he gives us a wide-field on lupus or crescentric glomerulonephritis? I wouldn't know them from a hole in the wall....

I hate the fucking kidney.

I do, I do, I do. Kidneys are evil. Wicked and evil and horrible. We have diabetic glomerulosclerosis, which is where all the little glomeruli have this diffuse thickeining, only some of them have little nodules - which is how you know it's diabetes, because only diabetics get nodular glomerulosclerosis (say that three times fast!) which, just to be confusing is also Kimmelsteil-Wilson's diseases. And then we have chronic pyelonephritis (nephr- means it's in the kidney), and that one has "thyroidisation of the tubules" which means that they look like little bits of thyroid, or googly eyes in my opinion, with bright pink stuff in the kidney tubules. Can't miss that. Thank heavens. And then there's the one with the spleen and two kidneys that has arteriolar disease, which has little vessels (if I can find a bedamned vessel) that show a little bit of thickening relative to normal (which I don't get to see), and I hope to high heavens that he puts that one down on one of the proliferating vessels that look like little onion rings and tapes it there. And then there's the one with amyloidosis of the kidney, which means that there's deposits of pink stuff all over the place. It's supposed to be in the glomeruli (which makes it look like diabetic glomerulosclerosis, so it's good that we have an atypical slide). And then acute glomerulonephritis, which is identifiable because the stain is really light...plus, in theory, the glomeruli are hypercellular. And lupus, which looks like diabetic glomerulosclerosis until you see a wire-loop *please god let him put it on a wire loop because I can't find the fucking things* And crescentric glomerulonephritis, which I can usually find a crescentric thickening if I know I should find one...but the way I panic when confronted with a kidney, who knows? And chronic glomerulonephritis...little knots of fibrous tissue in lieu of glomeruli. That one's almost as easy as chronic pyelonephritis. I rest my case. Kidneys are evil and wicked. And so help me...if he gives us the unstained cryptococcus slide I'm going to die. Exams. I hate exams.