A Year in Review: First Year, Second Semester

A continuation of my post from yesterday in regards to first year classes in the Medical Laboratory Sciences program at Michener.

Second Semester

• BAIP – Interprofessional Collaboration


• HEML – Hematology and Hemostasis


• HIML - Histotechnology


• INML - Clinical Instrumentation


• MIML – Applied Microbiology
  


• VPML - Specimen Procurement
  

BAIP - This is a course you will take all through out your time at Michener so just accept it and embrace it. Same as last semester, you will be in a class with people from all programs at Michener. The purpose is to interact with these professions and understand how you can work as an effective healthcare team. This portion of the course focuses on the Canadian Healthcare system and the rules and regulations in place for the professions. There is a huge group project on a "vulnerable" population. You will have to do a wiki page and huge presentation worth 70% but some of the courses are online which is nice!

HEML – Again this course was taught by Elizabeth who is awesome. This course is substantially harder as you have to memorize the coagulation pathway and understand a plethora of diseases. Responsible for knowing how to do PT/PTT testing with correction studies which can be a bit of pain. You also start working on machines in the lab which makes for a longer lab period (3hrs).

HIML - This course mostly revolves around the lab. The lecture covers everything you will be doing in the lab rather than two separate entities. You will learn to embed tissues in wax then cut 4 micron slices on a microtome to create slides. Very technical and hands on but a neat course as you get to see a lot of organs such as intestines, heart, femur etc. You learn the mechanisms of staining (some organic chem) but it's very basic. The prof Michelle is hilarious and engaging!

MIML – This is the tough micro course. Tons and tons of memorization. You need to memorize a LOT of different bacteria, information about them, identifying tests, symptoms, environments etc. You will also memorize identifying chemical tests (which can be 13+ tubes) and have to know what enterobacteriacae it is from those. (Non-motile, VP+ A/A is Klebsiella!) And the flow of testing to identify unknowns. Labs are very intensive and will take up all 3 hours each day (Thursday and Friday).

VPML– The dreaded phlebotomy course! You will learn to do blood draws using vacutainers and yes, you will perform it on human arms. Yes it will be on people in your lab group! You start with learning to put trays together and the different types of tubes and anti-coagulants. Then you get bumped up to practicing on fake arms and also doing micro-collection (finger pricks) on classmates. In the end you will do 3 human arm single draws and a multi-draw. I was afraid of needles starting the course but I ended up passing with flying colours.

So that is the end of my year in review! If you have any other information you want to know, feel free to email me at the address on the sidebar. Also, don't forget to subscribe so you can be alerted when I make new posts!

-K