The Strides of the Second Week

Last week, I went on a mentor visit for 8 hours at Plano Women's Healthcare, so this week I will not be attending a mentor visit as I am very busy with school work. Last week, I also completed 6 hours of my product log, which was a huge success as I am almost 20% complete with my final product. I have 5 portions to my final product: Part I: An overview of Pap smears, Part II: patient misconceptions, Part III: evidence and process for pap smear testing, Part IV: case studies of successful and unsuccessful pap smears, and Part V: tips to relieve the discomfort of the Pap smear experience. I annotated an article regarding a general overview of the cervical Pap smear and finished my first research assessment for my final product. The article was extremely helpful as it gave me insight into the history of a Pap smear, introduced some common patient misconceptions with the procedure, discussed its correlation with HPV and how HPV infection leads to an invasion of the uterine wall, which can cause carcinomas to arise. I am really interested in how the virus actually targets the S phase of mitosis, pushing cells to grow out of control, or overrides the biological checkpoints set in place to keep the cell in check from not becoming cancerous. I hope to explore this correlation in Part III and as I further progress into my work.