Day 6: The Strange Case of the 18 year-old cross country runner (and other things)

Sorry for the delayed update. Crazy things have been going on at school. So Day 6 and Day 7 will be uploaded on the same day!

So, Day 6 was pretty normal...well as normal as my biology class could possibly guess. We started with a quiz (which I didn't do too great of a job on. Hooray for retakes!!) and then we moved swiftly onto a House case.

Now, let me explain what a house case is. The entire class is given a virtual human specimen with some sort of affliction. Using the symptoms described to us by our patient, we then have to figure out what is wrong with the guy or else HE DIES!!!

The last part's not true, He can't die because he doesn't exist.  But if a real patient came to our class and asked us what was wrong with him, well he wouldn't be alive right now.

Our patient was an 18 year-old high school senior cross-country runner who began to vomit after practice. He had a severe headache and was extremely tired and confused. Going off of that, I turned to my trusted friend Google and searched for a cause for those symptoms. Most of the things I got were heat stroke, heat exhaustion, heat stress, basically things that happen when you're out in the heat for too long.

In class, we got to ask the patient more questions. And that's when the slightly strange part about that class came into play. Our teacher took on the role of an 18 year-old boy. And I have to say he did a pretty good job at it too, Oscar worthy performance.

From questioning him, we also found out what he ate before practice, how much water he had, medical history, prescriptions and drug facts, etc. And I was set on the conclusion that this boy suffered from over hydration and that the vomiting and other symptoms were caused by decreased salt levels in his bloodstream.

And I was wrong.

We were given his test results.

You can see my note on the bottom, "hyponatremia", 

When I got home, I did some more research and tried to make sense of what all the fancy test result notation could mean. 

I was right about the salt. His salt level had definitely decreased. His glucose levels were fine so it couldn't be anything sugar related. 

So a couple searches on the Internet and a short conversation with my mom (she's a doctor, is that cheating?) later, I decided that the 18 year-old suffered from hyponatremia. And I'm still awaiting either the confirmation or rejection of my claim.