Ureteritis

By Krista Morrow
Washington State University
Class of 2013

                As freshman students, we learned a game in pathology lab to practice correctly describing inflammation of certain organs. For example, if the spleen in an animal has signs of inflammation, you would refer to this as splenitis. To play the game, we went around in a circle in front of 25 or so peers, and one at a time named an organ for the next person to label. Some of us were more devious than others and thought up crafty ways to stump our classmates. They named obscure anatomies of the eyeball or other such parts that anatomy class didn’t even cover, sure enough causing profuse stammering and blotchy red faces.  Luckily I was given easier organs to describe.  

                However, I had to leave the lab every 15-20 minutes in the middle of a practically rib-breaking coughing fit (leftover from a nasty, long lasting virus all my classmates had that year-what we lovingly remember as the Plague of the Class of 2013). The game had ended by the time I had finished coughing up a lung, and the professor was asking us if we had any questions about organs we might have missed. Of course there would be a test!

                I’m usually a pretty quiet person, and especially as an awkward first year student didn’t typically enjoy asking questions in front of my classmates. However, I was drugged on cough syrup, Dayquil and had eaten more than the suggested dose of cough drops in one day than a person should consume in a week. I suppose I was in a drunkenly brave state of mind. “What would you call inflammation of the ureter?” I asked. Immediately I could feel some weird glances, and my teacher had paused and was kind of quizzingly staring at me. “Well, if you hadn’t have been in the bathroom, you would have known the answer to that question!” a classmate joked with me, and the rest giggled at their perceived irony of the situation. (I didn’t have to leave for the bathroom 4 times, I really was just coughing!) So apparently ureteritis had been asked about already.  Moral of the story-you don’t die from asking silly questions, but it would behoove one to stay quiet on days when one is drugged up on cough syrup!