There’s one picture from our little trip to the lab that I’m not going to post. Dr. Markello introduced us to a researcher named Heidi who he referred to as one of the silent heroes of HPS research. Heidi looks at our cells in a special microscope that shoots a laser through them so they light up brilliantly.
The microscope was housed in a little room in the lab, and it was hard for all of us to squeeze in there to see it – let alone for Dr. Meredith to have enough space to back up and take a good shot.
Heidi fired up the microscope and showed us both a “regular” cell and an HPS cell. The dense bodies showed up as this neon orange, and the other parts of the cell were glowing neon green to yellow. You could really see the difference in the two examples. It was actually pretty easy to see!
And I really, really wanted to see it. My nose was right up on the screen, so all poor Dr. Meredith could get a shot of was my rather large backside. I was so absorbed in the moment that I forgot she was trying to take pictures, until I heard the click of the camera.
“Dr. Meredith, you’d better not be taking pictures of my big butt…” I said. “Ummm….you can delete them later can’t you?” she answered. Ha ha ha!
I should have backed off and let her get a better shot of the microscope, but I couldn’t help it. I really wanted to see what those cells looked like, and our time was short.
When I was in college an interest in anything “science” related was the furthest thing from my mind. I remember being thoroughly disgusted I had to take any science-related class at all. I started my college career at a small liberal arts college before moving to the University of Kansas. Thus, I decided it was probably a good idea to get this silly requirement out of the way while I was still at a small school and thus could get more one-on-one help.
That meant my choices were biochemistry 101 or zoology 101. I went with zoology because my fear of mathematics was even bigger than my total non-interest in science. Besides, in high school I’d found biology pretty easy. Chemistry, on the other hand, I had to really work at to get through.
Boy did I work at that zoology class! It was hard, but I must confess, I actually really enjoyed it. I spent more time studying for that class my first semester of college than any of my other classes. And there were parts of it that I found completely stupid and frustrating. For example, for one lab test we had to identify, and learn the scientific names, for 200 different types of birds. Guess what? Just as I suspected at the time, today I can’t remember a single scientific name for a bird – and I spent hours upon hours learning them. At the same time, I found the lab experience for that test totally fascinating. As a legally blind person, I’d never really seen birds except the odd bird in a pet store. I knew what birds generally looked like, but I had no real appreciation for how complex they really looked, or how much they could vary – and not just in size and color, but things like the difference in the texture of their feathers, the shapes of their feet, or the shapes of their beaks. The zoology lab had an extensive collection of stuffed birds, and I was allowed total access to them to study for my test. I spent hours late at night with these big trays of stuffed birds, carefully groping each one. For me, it was like getting let inside the cages at the zoo to look at the animals up close – except that, of course, they were all dead.
This method of tactile discovery worked really well for the tests on sea creatures, and small mammals, but it didn’t work so great for the sections on things like basic cell structure, bacteria and other such microscopic organisms.
I had a wonderful zoology professor. He was an older guy (old enough that he’d taught biology-related classes when my mother attended the same college.) Together we spent several hours trying to find a way for me to be able to look into a microscope and actually see something. We never could get it to work.
Looking through the microscope, I pretty much couldn’t see anything. My professor tried to rig up the microscope to a television screen and project the image on the bigger screen. Now I could tell there was a blob in the microscope, but I had a hard time picking out any of the parts of the blob. And, all the blobs pretty much looked the same to me.
So “Doc,” my professor, assigned me a lab assistant to go through the lab materials with me. She’d describe what I was supposed to see in the microscope, and I’d draw a picture of what I understood her to say. She’d look at the picture, and correct anything I hadn’t really understood correctly. It worked okay.
On test day, instead of moving from station to station to identify different things in the microscopes, like the other 140 students in the class, I sat down with the professor himself and went through everything we were supposed to learn, by memory, drawing everything out on a dry erase board. I’d essentially teach the information back to him to prove I knew it.
I’m not sure if it would have been easier, or harder, to take the tests the way the rest of the students did. But I did feel a certain extra pressure to know the material inside and out since I had to take the test, one-on-one, with the professor himself. You couldn’t just do “okay” and blend into the rest of the crowd. I had to sit in the front row every day, and I knew that the professor knew exactly how well I was doing and whether I understood what he was talking about.
And just to make it even more exciting, I had learned Braille the summer before. This was the first class for which I took all of my notes in Braille. That was a feat I’d never pull off again. By the next semester I was well into Crohn’s territory, struggling with pretty severe fatigue, and I abandoned Braille for print because at the time print was still faster for me. I often think if I’d just gotten sick a semester later, I’d be a pretty fluid Braille user today. But, that’s another story.
Anyway, I did very well in my zoology class. I had a pretty solid A. But, I always wondered if that was partly because of the way I’d had to take the lab tests? What if that professor had cut me a bit of slack because we were working so one-on-one? Would I have been able to cut it if I’d had to take the tests the way everyone else did? It really bothered me.
And it really bothered me that I never got to see what the little cells and various organisms really looked in the microscope. The birds and the fish and the rodents had all been so much more interesting than I’d ever expected – I was sure I was missing out on the little cellular organisms.
As I saw no future for myself in any kind of science-related field, I just chalked it up to one of those concessions you’ve got to make and counted myself lucky to have found a way to jump through this particular hoop on the way to graduation.
A few years ago Dr. Gahl had an image of an HPS platelet in motion as part of his presentation at conference. I’m not sure if our devoted doctors really understand that if we’re not sitting in the front row, (and sometimes even then) we really can’t see their presentations. But, knowing he had that on his laptop hard drive, I had to see it. At the break I asked if I could see it again, only now close up. He showed it to me. It was in black and white, not the colors we saw this last week at the lab. It looked to me as though there were little insects of some sort moving from the center of the cell out to the edges and maybe back again. But, I was pretty happy to see anything at all.
So, when this image popped up on the screen so large and so colorful – I had to get my nose on it. I just had to. Heidi quickly pointed out some of the things she looks at – we couldn’t just stay there and stare at it – but in my mind I wanted to say something like, hold up, I need more time to look at this. To H.E. double hockey sticks with the pictures of the lab – I need to see this thing.
When I’m looking at something complex that I’m having a hard time seeing, I tend to imagine a grid on top of it, and move from section to section, taking it in only a part at a time. I couldn’t just sit there with my little mental grid and ask what each little thing was – and in the greater scheme it probably doesn’t really matter if I ever know what the differences were between the little green parts and the little yellow parts in the middle etc.
I was simply really happy to just get to see something at all.
So, I’m sorry you all don’t get to see the microscope, or my big butt – this was my little selfish moment.
The microscope was housed in a little room in the lab, and it was hard for all of us to squeeze in there to see it – let alone for Dr. Meredith to have enough space to back up and take a good shot.
Heidi fired up the microscope and showed us both a “regular” cell and an HPS cell. The dense bodies showed up as this neon orange, and the other parts of the cell were glowing neon green to yellow. You could really see the difference in the two examples. It was actually pretty easy to see!
And I really, really wanted to see it. My nose was right up on the screen, so all poor Dr. Meredith could get a shot of was my rather large backside. I was so absorbed in the moment that I forgot she was trying to take pictures, until I heard the click of the camera.
“Dr. Meredith, you’d better not be taking pictures of my big butt…” I said. “Ummm….you can delete them later can’t you?” she answered. Ha ha ha!
I should have backed off and let her get a better shot of the microscope, but I couldn’t help it. I really wanted to see what those cells looked like, and our time was short.
When I was in college an interest in anything “science” related was the furthest thing from my mind. I remember being thoroughly disgusted I had to take any science-related class at all. I started my college career at a small liberal arts college before moving to the University of Kansas. Thus, I decided it was probably a good idea to get this silly requirement out of the way while I was still at a small school and thus could get more one-on-one help.
That meant my choices were biochemistry 101 or zoology 101. I went with zoology because my fear of mathematics was even bigger than my total non-interest in science. Besides, in high school I’d found biology pretty easy. Chemistry, on the other hand, I had to really work at to get through.
Boy did I work at that zoology class! It was hard, but I must confess, I actually really enjoyed it. I spent more time studying for that class my first semester of college than any of my other classes. And there were parts of it that I found completely stupid and frustrating. For example, for one lab test we had to identify, and learn the scientific names, for 200 different types of birds. Guess what? Just as I suspected at the time, today I can’t remember a single scientific name for a bird – and I spent hours upon hours learning them. At the same time, I found the lab experience for that test totally fascinating. As a legally blind person, I’d never really seen birds except the odd bird in a pet store. I knew what birds generally looked like, but I had no real appreciation for how complex they really looked, or how much they could vary – and not just in size and color, but things like the difference in the texture of their feathers, the shapes of their feet, or the shapes of their beaks. The zoology lab had an extensive collection of stuffed birds, and I was allowed total access to them to study for my test. I spent hours late at night with these big trays of stuffed birds, carefully groping each one. For me, it was like getting let inside the cages at the zoo to look at the animals up close – except that, of course, they were all dead.
This method of tactile discovery worked really well for the tests on sea creatures, and small mammals, but it didn’t work so great for the sections on things like basic cell structure, bacteria and other such microscopic organisms.
I had a wonderful zoology professor. He was an older guy (old enough that he’d taught biology-related classes when my mother attended the same college.) Together we spent several hours trying to find a way for me to be able to look into a microscope and actually see something. We never could get it to work.
Looking through the microscope, I pretty much couldn’t see anything. My professor tried to rig up the microscope to a television screen and project the image on the bigger screen. Now I could tell there was a blob in the microscope, but I had a hard time picking out any of the parts of the blob. And, all the blobs pretty much looked the same to me.
So “Doc,” my professor, assigned me a lab assistant to go through the lab materials with me. She’d describe what I was supposed to see in the microscope, and I’d draw a picture of what I understood her to say. She’d look at the picture, and correct anything I hadn’t really understood correctly. It worked okay.
On test day, instead of moving from station to station to identify different things in the microscopes, like the other 140 students in the class, I sat down with the professor himself and went through everything we were supposed to learn, by memory, drawing everything out on a dry erase board. I’d essentially teach the information back to him to prove I knew it.
I’m not sure if it would have been easier, or harder, to take the tests the way the rest of the students did. But I did feel a certain extra pressure to know the material inside and out since I had to take the test, one-on-one, with the professor himself. You couldn’t just do “okay” and blend into the rest of the crowd. I had to sit in the front row every day, and I knew that the professor knew exactly how well I was doing and whether I understood what he was talking about.
And just to make it even more exciting, I had learned Braille the summer before. This was the first class for which I took all of my notes in Braille. That was a feat I’d never pull off again. By the next semester I was well into Crohn’s territory, struggling with pretty severe fatigue, and I abandoned Braille for print because at the time print was still faster for me. I often think if I’d just gotten sick a semester later, I’d be a pretty fluid Braille user today. But, that’s another story.
Anyway, I did very well in my zoology class. I had a pretty solid A. But, I always wondered if that was partly because of the way I’d had to take the lab tests? What if that professor had cut me a bit of slack because we were working so one-on-one? Would I have been able to cut it if I’d had to take the tests the way everyone else did? It really bothered me.
And it really bothered me that I never got to see what the little cells and various organisms really looked in the microscope. The birds and the fish and the rodents had all been so much more interesting than I’d ever expected – I was sure I was missing out on the little cellular organisms.
As I saw no future for myself in any kind of science-related field, I just chalked it up to one of those concessions you’ve got to make and counted myself lucky to have found a way to jump through this particular hoop on the way to graduation.
A few years ago Dr. Gahl had an image of an HPS platelet in motion as part of his presentation at conference. I’m not sure if our devoted doctors really understand that if we’re not sitting in the front row, (and sometimes even then) we really can’t see their presentations. But, knowing he had that on his laptop hard drive, I had to see it. At the break I asked if I could see it again, only now close up. He showed it to me. It was in black and white, not the colors we saw this last week at the lab. It looked to me as though there were little insects of some sort moving from the center of the cell out to the edges and maybe back again. But, I was pretty happy to see anything at all.
So, when this image popped up on the screen so large and so colorful – I had to get my nose on it. I just had to. Heidi quickly pointed out some of the things she looks at – we couldn’t just stay there and stare at it – but in my mind I wanted to say something like, hold up, I need more time to look at this. To H.E. double hockey sticks with the pictures of the lab – I need to see this thing.
When I’m looking at something complex that I’m having a hard time seeing, I tend to imagine a grid on top of it, and move from section to section, taking it in only a part at a time. I couldn’t just sit there with my little mental grid and ask what each little thing was – and in the greater scheme it probably doesn’t really matter if I ever know what the differences were between the little green parts and the little yellow parts in the middle etc.
I was simply really happy to just get to see something at all.
So, I’m sorry you all don’t get to see the microscope, or my big butt – this was my little selfish moment.
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