Objective 35: Describe the formation and flow of lymph

I can not say it enough but I hate the lymphatic system. The textbook was my guide in learning that lymph originates as plasma, which is the fluid portion of blood. The arterial blood that flows out of the heart slows as it moves through a capillary bed (see figure above). This slowing allows some plasma to leave the arterioles and flow into the tissues where it becomes extracellular fluid, This  fluid delivers nutrients, oxygen, and hormones to the cells. As this fluid leaves the cells, it takes with it cellular waste products and protein cells. Approximately 90 percent of this tissue fluid flows into the venules. Here it enters the venous circulation as plasma and continues in the circulatory system. The remaining 10 percent of the fluid that is left behind is now known as lymph.  The bloodstream is pumped by the heart. It circulates throughout the body and is cleansed by being filtered by the kidneys. The lymphatic system does not have a pump to aid in its flow, instead this system is designed so that lymph only flows upward through the body traveling from the hands and feet and upward through the body toward the neck.  As it travels through the body, lymph passes through lymph nodes where it is filtered. At the base of the neck, the lymph enters the subclavian veins and once again becomes plasma in the bloodstream.

Objective 40: Cellular and non-cellular immunity

Non-cellular Immunity
Humoral Immunity aka non-cellular immunity is the world of antibodies and non-cellular means of killing foreign agents within the body. An antibody is generally specific to the thing being attacked. It's called having antigen-specificity. For example, you never or I have never heard of anyone getting chicken pox twice. Because, either through vaccination or actually having the disease, you made antibodies to the specific virus causing chicken pox. The chicken pox virus was the "antigen" which signaled the making of the antibody which was made against only that virus. Finally, long lasting cells inside your body kept that specific memory alive so that antibodies to chicken pox could always be created immediately just in case your exposed later in life. It's a pretty good system; we have antibodies against practically anything we have ever been exposed to and fought off in our entire life.  

Cell mediated
Cell mediated immunity begins where everything in the immune system begins-in the bone marrow. The bone marrow makes nearly all of the components of the blood. Bone marrow-based stem cells form two kinds of lymphocytes, T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes. I just read my textbook one night and try to absorb everything I could.  I remember this was a hard concept in lecture to follow it seemed as though no one knew anything about these two immunities.

Objective 36 & 42: Pathogen types and outlining how the body protects itself & Distinguish Innate Immunity from Acquired Immunity

I know about four or five pathogen types such as viral, fungal, bacterial, parasitic, and prionic.  I have learned from my teacher and the book that our body has defenses. I found a neat link that details the three defenses and it was extraordinary in helping me learn about non-specific and specific immunity.  The link is http://www.kirkwood.edu/pdf/uploaded/695/immune_and_lymphatic2.pdf

Innate Immunity 
To achieve this objective I mainly used my book to learn about innate aka nonspecific immunity.  What I took from the book is that innate immunity is like being deployed and going to war.  First you have your first fleet of men going out and handling their business against invaders, but then the first fleet could not handle the enemy so here comes backup. 
Backup is heating up everybody.


Acquired Immunity
Acquired immunity is like special ops, when all else fails they are called in and they will try their hardest to defeat the enemy.  If they can not get them nothing else can.  That is how I interpreted and learned about this subject.  Thinking about the army and what they are going up against.

Objective 39: Why development of self-tolerance is important

By reading my textbook and actually paying attention in lecture.  I learned that self-tolerance is where the body does not mount an immune response to self-antigens.   If in fact the immune system responded and attacked "self" an auto-immune disease would occur.  I actually have a patient with Multiple Sclerosis which is an auto-immune disease.  Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a debilitating disease in which your body's immune system eats away at the protective sheath that covers your nerves. This interferes with the communication between your brain and the rest of your body.  My patient is only 31 and this disease has totally debilatated her.  She can not talk, walk, move it really breaks my heart because she is such a nice positive upbeat woman.  I would really love to see her get up and walk and have a life.  I do not have a digital artifact because I see no barrings for none.

Objective 41: Summarize Development and Maturation of B&T lymphocytes

I really did not grasp the concept of the B or T lymphocyte.  I will say that what I will always remember is where both of them matures because Mrs. Gess brought it up loads of times.  I could be sleeping and I would still here that the B lymphocytes matures in the bone marrow and the T lymphocytes mature in the thymus. During lecture I also understood that the lymphocytes protects our body from pathogens through humoral and cellular responses.  The video above helped me sort of grasp the B lymphocytes role.  The video below helped with the T lymphocytes.

Objective 34 & 37: Components and functions of the lymphatic and immune system & Compare the structure and functions of the primary and secondary lymphatic organs and tissues

Honestly, I think my least favorite systems we covered is the lymphatic and the immune system but more so lymphatic.  I thought I would have liked to learn about them both but for me it was just too much information.  I had an information overload and it was not pleasant because just hearing the word lymph made my head hurt.  The picture to the right was sufficient enough for me to clear these objectives.  I found this diagram on the Cornell University's website.  It is a great visual aid that showcases the primary and secondary lymphatic organs and then goes on to summarize their functions.  I thought this diagram worked for objective 34 as well.

Objective 38: Relate edema and lymph flow

I just used this picture as a visual aid to see the comparison of blood flow and lymph flow.  I learned from research that lymph basically moves because of a pressure gradient. When the fluid pressure outside of the lymph capillaries is higher on the outside, lymph flows in. Because there is no pump for the lymph fluid, it moves through the body very much the same way that blood returns from the distal limbs to the heart; through skeletal muscle contraction and change in pressure due to respiration. Knowing that the lymph node pictured above is basically a large filter for all of the stuff that your body has to process; its easy to understand that the nodes can sometimes become backed up.  Thus the backing up of the lymph fluid can cause edema.