Garnet's Life Adventures

the long walk & an "ah ha" moment

Yesterday afternoon the Northern Line closed down - I had seen it online - so I planned on getting to the bus stop extra early since everyone would have to take it instead of the tube. 08.00 I arrive at the bus stop and proceed to stand there for 40 minutes and watch bus after bus just drive by, completely full of passengers. At this point I started to add in my head how long I thought it would take to walk to school. Kevin has once told me it took him 25 minutes to walk home - he lives about 20 minutes away from me, so if I left "now" I could make it with a few minutes to spare. I started to hoof it down Kentish Town Road. Normally this would not have been a big deal, but you have to understand it finally started to rain yesterday and so this morning it was still raining. I passed by Camden Town Stn, Mornington Crescent Stn, Warren St Stn, Goodge Street Stn and I turned onto Store Street did a quick time check, 09.20! I had been walking at a very fast pace since I wasn't really sure where in Camden Town Kevin lived and his stride is probably a lot longer than mine, so it might take me longer than my little calculation I started out with. All that really matters is I made it to class with 2 minutes to spare - my jeans and sweater were a little damp. With all that "fresh" London air in my lungs I was ready to start my morning of lectures :)

This morning's lectures were on complement. A professor from Imperial College named Marina ______ taught us. Her lecture was quite interesting and very complicated, but she was able to break it down to a level that we could understand, without all the biochemistry.

A friend of mine who's in the Medical Microbiology course was turning 21 today (ya know "really old" as he said to me the other day) so Louise, Katie, and I took him out to lunch. We all had 2 hours so it was a nice relaxing lunch with hot chocolate since it was cool and damp from all the rain.

At 14.00 we met up for our 3 hour "review" - we had no clue what that really meant, but learned soon enough! For the first 10 minutes we looked over our data from the phagocytosis lab - discovered there were some problems with the way the lab was set up, hence we all had bad results. Next was the "review" section. John explained we were going to break up into 3 groups and discuss everything we'd learned up to this point and how it all fit together. Sounded easy enough, right?!?!?! John asked us to, "Draw a diagram of what happens when a bacteria gets inside of you." Yeah this seems pretty easy until you put 5 people together who all have a different view of how the innate immune system works. The neutrophils are first, no the macrophages are first, INFgamma is secreted by MHC class I, no the MHC binds the APC to the T-cell, no the B-cells have MHCs. It went on like that for about 1.45 hours. I have to admit it was really good to do this b/c it made all the separate lectures sort of "fall into place" and some people were able to get their facts straight about which cell did what. I could see the light bulb ("ah ha") sort of going off in my head.

A few girls & I are going to form a little "study group" so we can help each other understand how all these processes work. Also each one of us will take 2 journal articles, read, and give an overview - so we don't all have to read 15 articles! We only have so much awake time :)

Oh one other funny story (well maybe only funny to Trudeau people) I forgot to tell on the first day of classes. Greg Bancroft started the lecture out by asking us, "so what do you already know about T cells and B cells" My poor little mind could answer was:

• Fran talks about B cells and antibodies and they're from the bone marrow
  
• Woody talks about the types of T cells and they're from the thymus.

It was almost hard for me to focus on what he was saying b/c I was laughing at myself for thinking of that answer.

posted by Sara @ 8:20 pm