Leucocytes, haemostasis, 30 compressions, and 2 breaths

Hi! Sunday evening and it's been a long week--- lots of school, with classes and labs and practical work. I guess I may have given the impression here that all I'm doing is walking around happily in the mountains and the beautiful landscapes here, but yes, my life for the moment pretty much consists of studying... in pathology we're learning the basis of cell dysfunction and apoptosis, as well as cancerogenesis. Immunology has us all completely lost in all the types of white blood cells and their development and function. In hematology we've done all about blood clotting this week-- Von Willebrand's disease, hemophilia type A and B... all fun things that have been on the menu. I guess Wednesday was the only day when I wasn't drowning in the immune system-- we had a practical of 4 hours in the hospital being taught by ambulance personnel about basic life support (BLS), doing compressions and mouth-to-mouth and whatnot, trying desperately to save the lives of our very sick dummies (all while the AED is saying things like "shock discouraged, keep doing compressions", or "please stay calm" or "step away from the patient, analysis in progress!"). We all got our certification document after though, and are now supposed to be able to take charge in any emergency situation (hmmm? only a third year here!!). But it's true- in the event that a situation does arise, who does people turn to for help? The person with the most medical experience, even if that happens to be a student... I guess the distinction line between student and "person who knows what to do" is wiped out when people panic..

I was overall quite happy for it to be the weekend, and I've managed to be a little social too, spending Friday evening with a friend also on exchange from Brussels, drinking some delicious Chocolat Viennois at a cafe at Grancy :). Saturday I did some studying, but then at night saw "Les Intouchables" with a friend from school-- one of the best movies I have seen in a while! It came out a while ago but I just haven't had the chance to go out and see it, but definitely worth a watch!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXu2MhWYUuE


I also captured two really pretty nature moments this week- poor quality because they're taken on my phone BUT I think you get the idea:

Monday evening at the Dorigny Campus with new
snow on the mountains along the lake...

Morning sky on Wednesday..

Then as promised, I have today taken another walk up into the woods to look for autumn colors... I guess I was pretty successful ;-)

 

As I predicted the forest is beautifully clad in all shades of orange, golden yellow, and still shades of green and brown.

Since I'm being academic today, here's the explanation (given as an example in one of our first biochemistry lectures this year) for why the leaves all do this very creative change every year, here labeled using fluorescent markers for ubiquitin:

It's all to do with the cell cycle and levels of ubiquitination happening at different (and random) rates! It's a great example when explaining simple cell signaling.

This week I'm going on a trip to Bath in England to visit my boyfriend, so I'm really excited about that! A little break from the studying is going to do me some good!

Bisous from Switzerland <3 Thanks for reading! 

p.s. for any piano lovers like me, I  discovered the music of Ludovico Einaudi (who wrote the theme to Intouchables)-- absolutely beautiful- just search him on spotify or listen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_mUuvgGnC4&feature=related