CSI: Boston

Not another series to look forward on TV but what we have experienced so far this week has been nothing short of CSI. Indeed a week peppered with mysteries, twists and . as CY insisted, "Horatio Caine coolness".

1) We had Registration Day at MIT the past Tuesday and here's Mystery #1 - MIT doesn't use an online system for registering, adding or dropping classes (at least not for incoming students). Coincidentally, we also had a mysterious hold (essentially meaning the school admin blocked us from registering). As a result, we had to trod down the infinite corridor of MIT to the student service center, where our hold had already mysteriously disappeared and our registration forms were on a desk ready to be handed out. We headed back to our advisor, had her signed our forms and left with Mystery #1 unsolved.

2) We got to learn of this prior to this week already but since the theme for this week is CSI, it wouldn't hurt to throw in another mystery which is perhaps just a week too old. Mystery #2 - Harvard has a fall semester which breaks before Christmas, after which students return for a 2-week reading period and then take their finals. A corollary to that is Harvard apparently runs a very different academic calender compared to MIT. A secondary corollary (if you will, corollary of a corollary) is that we, as HST students, have to absorb two different academic calenders with occasional differences in holidays like Fall break and Spring Break. To identify our holidays, it is now necessary to use the logical operator AND. Only when both MIT and Harvard have holidays at the same time will we have ours. Somehow the arrival of my PDA phone (with wonderful Outlook Calendar functions) makes me slightly more comforted.

3) Human Pathology class has already convened twice this week. The first lab was eye-opening, especially when we saw organs (preserved and fixed in formalin) of all diseases state laid out in front of us. The second class was the appetizer to the "Horatio Kane coolness". We had a lecture on autopsy, how to do an autopsy and finally had a medical examiner who used to work in NYC to talk to us on the various cases he had worked on before. Interestingly, one of his cases, involving an undercover cop cross-firing with a cop in a subway station, bears remarkable resemblance to an episode in CSI: New York. Now here's the deal of coolness. We are now in a team of four and charged with a beeper. Once the beeper goes off, we will rush to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in 15 min, suit up and join a resident in doing an actual autopsy. Mystery #3, however, is that although the hospital will know 1 hour in advanced of a deceased on whom an autopsy can be done, we can only be informed 15 min prior to the start of the autopsy.

Autopsy = Educational but gory
Beeper = exciting but intrinsically meaningless
Beeper + Autopsy = Horatio Kane coolness

4) Yet another appetizer, we had a taste of clinical medicine today at Brigham and Women's Hospital. The key highlight had to be our trip to the phlebotomy department (aka blood drawing department). We had our hands on drawing blood from our classmates (even CY drew) and in turn, had ours drawn. We then took the blood to run tests in machines which analyzed the cellular content in 30 seconds. Cool huh, but the limelight still had to be stolen by the new blood drawing needle we saw prior. Manufactured by BD Biosciences, it is a retractable needle which, at the end of the blood drawing, retracts out of the skin and flesh into a hidden compartment in a split of the second. No more of the unbearable pulling out of needle. Engineering rules.

TC