Whooa-ee--oo!--agh--ummm (interpretive sounds of the last two days)

Only a couple more to go! I accomplished a perfect score on the Developmental anatomy exam, which was quickly overshadowed by what appeared to be my brain's decision to forget everything I ever knew about histology. So I did what any sane person would do and had a panic attack, made chocolate cake, and then spent the rest of the night studying. And I think I did okay. In histo I tend to get answers wrong if I don't know them for sure, but that seemed to be a much smaller portion of the exam than stuff I did know. So, yay.

Today is a study day. Physiology. The bus to school never did show up, so I had to take an alternative bus route to get within walking distance (actually, I probably could have walked in the amount of time I spent waiting for the darn thing, but that would have defeated the point of public transportation, no?). And now it's high time to study.

One down

Small Animal Anatomy is over and I'm still standing. The written exam was horrible...we'd already spent two hours in lab, and I was drifting off as I read through the test. I roused myself to actual concentration on the second run through it. Then people collected in the lounge afterward and discussed the exam with varying degrees of enthusiasm. For a while we had a crowd students in one corner of "The answer was definitely 'e'." But, those of us who said "a" were vindicated in the end when the professors posted the key. Ha-Hah! There are always the questions you get wrong, and then there are the questions that you get wrong and take personally. Darn you, muscles-innervated-by-musculocutanous-nerve!

I have come to the conclusion that I hate studying for exams. Next semester I plan to spend my time every week in fervent study, for the sheer purpose of being able to goof off for a few hours before actual exams. It will be completely worth it. Sooooo worth it. As it is, I have to go study fervently for the few hours (17 and counting) until my next exam.

Dance!

So, the vet students got completely left out of this year's malpractice ball, since snooty med and law students figured we weren't professional enough to merit more than a handful of tickets to the annual dance...as a result, the vet students banded together to have their own dance, which is tonight.

I've never actually been to a non-ballroom student org dance before, so I keep worrying that they won't have danceable music. I wouldn't know what to do at a dance if there was no dancing. By which I mean hustle, waltz, and cha-cha (all other types negotiable but not necessary). It will be interesting... Not least because most of the students are going to be stressing to some degree or other about upcoming finals. Eek! One week! Not enough time to cram! I was only a moderately decent student today, but I figure I get points for going to the vet school at 7:30 am on a Saturday to hunch over a cadaver for three or four hours. This afternoon slunk away on me though--after talking with a couple people, having lunch, and reading a bit, it was suddenly well into the evening.

Conferences and wetlabs

Once again I'm studying for a physiology exam, although the students banded together this time and talked the professors into pushing it back until Wednesday. Good thing too, as I haven't really had any weekend for studying for a couple of weeks now. I spent my weekends on good, honorable vet student things, but studying for upcoming exams? Not so much.

The first amazingly cool way to spend a weekend was the Marine Mammal Conference. This consisted of two mornings of lectures about whale evolution, seal medicine, and things you never knew about manatees (they like power plants). I may have to write an entire separate post on manatees. They're just that cool.

The afternoons we spent in lab, becoming acquainted with ten seal cadavers. Saturday we basically just stood around and poked them. A few lucky people did cerebral spinal fluid taps, but there wasn't much CSF to be had. Lots of ultrasounding though. A guy from a big ultrasound equipment company was there with a half dozen primo machines. He didn't seem so nervous about them as the techs were. I got snapped at by one lady for handing an ultrasound wand (yeah, there's a real term for it, but I don't recall what it is) to another student.

"Put that back on the table--that way there's no way it can get dropped," she said. But really, if we had dropped it, it only would have landed on soft seal carcass...

And Sunday afternoon, us lucky ones who got into the limited-space lab got to dissect the seals. Since I'm a first year, all dissections are still cool, although much of the comparative anatomy is lost on me. "Hey look, that's the liver!"
"Do you notice anything about that liver? Like that it's only partially lobed..."
"Nope! But it's definitely a liver! And hey, look, a kidney! Say, these legs don't look quite like the dog cadaver..."

And the whole conference was made additionally fun by houseguests. I hosted a couple of students who have far more aquatics experience than I. They too had exams the following week. So, although this did not mean any of us studied over the weekend (much) no one complained about going to bed on time.

This weekend was nearly as much fun as far as labs go. We had a wet lab for critical care yesterday. Somewhere they had obtained a towering cart of recently deceased dogs for us to practice life-saving techniques on. Almost every place you can stick a tube we did, and a couple of other places too. The dog my partner and I had was a bit more gone than most of the others. Green on the edges. But she was a good dog...This is something that gets said a lot during lab. After a bit of joking around, someone says with genuine feeling, "But it's a good dog."

So that was Saturday. Today I woke up, studied...

I would have had much more time to study today, but I foolishly thought I could do some errands "quickly". Hah! I admit it gave me great joy to buy things at the used bookstore. It gave me less joy to stand in line at the craft store while two cashiers tried to deal with the Sunday afternoon horde of shoppers. At least I have finally obtained the materials I need to carry out a commission I got, what, last spring?

But now it's time to go learn more about cardiovascular physiology. Just one more exam and then it's Thanksgiving! (give or take a week)

Physiology, with a break for giraffes

Today was lots and lots of studying for the physiology exam tomorrow. I woke up and studied. And made cookies. Took the cookies to the vet school for some of the other students who showed up for the review. The professor came in for a couple of hours of review. And I found out my score on the histology exam--83. Not so good. There weren't many things I was dead wrong on, but a lot of little missteps. Most frustrating are the answers where you cross out your first answer, and it turns out you had it right. But they don't give you credit for that sort of thing.

I took a break afterward to go biking, since it has been insanely beautiful outside, and very warm today. I biked to Vilas zoo and saw some of the animals, including the giraffes. There's LOTS of interesting things we've learned about giraffes, since they're physiological marvels in a couple of ways. Big hearts and very long nerves. The baby (okay, not really a baby, he's definitely over a year old) was trying to trip his mom. He looked just like the calves when they stand under their moms' necks and bop their heads up and down. Only in this case the calf was 10 feet tall and the mom even taller. Very cute.

Kidney complexity

Today was the first day on the renal system. Our professor obviously found the subject material fascinating. The teachers get a certain light in their eyes when they talk about their favorite subject. She was able to communicate her enthusiasm, too, which not all of the professors can manage. The kidneys win as the strangest organs in the body.



The heart, which we recently started learning about in anatomy, is beautifully simple, whereas kidneys just get more complex as you go. They have teensy arteries in glorious profusion, but ordered too. Long straight branches of blood vessels that hand off tiny bunches of capillaries. Like trees. Or like an orchard, with a bundle of capillaries hanging off the branches of every tree. Then within the capillary bundles are podocytes, cells that look like centipedes stretched along the surfaces. Very, very strange.

(There's a picture of a podocyte on this webpage: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/ransom.lab/the_glomerular_podocyte)

Meltdown

It's funny, but I can now manage to have panic attacks both when I am studying and when I am not studying.

Yesterday, in histo lab, I was working my way through the slides, with that sort of emotionally neutral contentedness that accompanies good lab time. Then the student next to me started talking with the professor about how worried she was about the exam. She said she'd been looking at old exams, and the level of detail they had, and she just didn't know how she was going to manage it. She sounded pretty freaked out. And this student spends way more time studying in lab than I do. So by the time the professor had reassured her, I was starting to feel freaked out. Working through the slides only emphasized how much we have to know by next week, so studying became this battle of nerves.

Then today. I was at home on the farm and had to check on cows this morning, and I spent time with the dogs and cats too. Then there was this chest of drawers to go pick up...The ENTIRE afternoon was spent between thrift stores and the other farm, with no chance to study. As I got more stressed out at time passing, my ever-so-supportive family was sympathetic and worried--but not particularly helpful in letting me go study.

Now I've been sitting at the computer the last half hour being really stressed out, paralyzed by the prospect of trying to study tonight and still get to the scheduled events that, y'know, it would be nice to be at. Outside, the light's gone all rosy and imminent-twilightish, which is a good indication that it's time for me to log off and get around to important things.

Like, oh, studying comes to mind.

Total Expiration

The way our physiology professor describes a breathing test (like you'd do for asthma) is all in a sort of monotone voice and goes like this: "Breathe in. No, all the way, don't be wimp. Now breathe out, keep going, stop being a wimp..."

Vet school is a little like that. "Learn this, all of it, don't be a wimp, here's some more."

In the past, the thought crossed my mind that there's a lot of medicine that, to be honest, isn't that hard. I've tubed lambs and vaccinated cows, even helped set a few broken legs, and none of that was really challenging once you get the hang of it. So what in med school is worth thousands of dollars a year? What sort of information is so hard to get at, and so valuable, that only doctors have it?

The word exhaustive comes to mind. (ex. drug interactions, though that's a topic for another day)

Anatomy lab is a pretty unique thing. It's not so hard, maybe, to get a dog that died and dissected it. But it's hard to learn every muscle as you go along, and it's definitely hard to get two dozen dog cadavers together and look at all of them. But we do that. It's incredibly expensive to make the special stained slides of two hundred different tissues that we put under microscopes for histology, but every student gets a box of those for the year too. When I get home I try to tell the most interesting things I learned to whatever family or hapless friends are around, but it doesn't do it justice. There's the facts, and there's the facts that I'll remember. In undergrad, I maybe retained half of what my classes presented (hopefully the right half). In vet school, it's all important, and it just keeps adding up. Learning the muscles is like learning the alphabet: yes, you have to know all of the letters.

And in many ways, that makes it easier to learn. It has a purpose, it has a direction. I've been advised to read James Herriot once in a while, after class, to remind me what I'm going to class for. It's not to take tests. Tests are a means to an end, to learn what still needs to be learned. In the end, it comes back to the animals and the people they are important to.

Incidentally, a fun thing about being a vet student: you can walk up to random people who are out with their dog and say, "Hi, I just noticed your beautiful dog {dachsund/wolfhound/mutt). Would it be okay if I pet him? I'm a vet student!"

I mean, not that you couldn't randomly pet strangers' dogs anyway. It just gives you a really good excuse :)

One month in (almost), and some other lessons I've learned:

1. There's no such thing as eating half a donut at the morning lecture.
2. Looking at cells through a microscope is more fun than it sounds like.
3. Intervertebral disks have the prettiest cartilage. (it dyes electric blue!)
4. One hour in lab equals two hours of studying, because one hour in lab can feel like THREE hours of studying.
5. There are more parts to a bone than you ever knew.
5.a. And you have to know all of them.
5.b. Ditto for muscles.
6. Radiology is NOT nap time.
6.a. But that ten minutes between classes IS.
7. Free pizza lunch lectures don't come with dessert. Stock your locker with cookies.
8. And for my boyfriend: you know you're with a vet student when she wants to hold your hand...so she can practice identifying muscle attachments.

Meep?

The fastest physiology lecture ever--the lecturer just sped through the Nernst equation and let us go. I'm not sure I know what the Nernst equation is, but now I have lots of time to go find out.

They told us that we would be spending lots of time at the vet school, that classes would take all day and we'd barely have time to study. I'm sure that is true, but it makes the first week or two unsettling. There's all these random pockets of time that I'm not sure how to fill. The biggest problem is that now I'm not sure when to eat. Normally I like to wake up and eat breakfast, then go and have my time monopolized by work or class until it's time for lunch. Ditto for dinner. If I don't have lots of stuff to occupy my time I default to food. This works great during summer, when I eat food in very small portions about ten times a day. Not so good when I had a filling plateful of pizza during the student org meeting at lunch, plus cookie and candy to power through lecture (turned out they weren't necessary).

So. I could go look at cadavers and learn muscles better. Or histo slides. It's raining, so goofing off outside isn't an option.

Darn it, I need more stuff to learn!

Scalpels are fun!

So far things are working today...I woke up, ate breakfast and rushed to class. I hold that I got there exactly on time, but realistically I was probably ten seconds late. And it was anatomy, too, which starts promptly and doesn't slow down until every last nanosecond has been eked out of the 50 minutes.

Histology doesn't have this problem. Histology, the professors just blithely keep going until they've finished whatever they're talking about, and graciously allow us to be late for lab. Since it's the lab for histology, they can do that.

Two labs today, wherein we learned that
1. As long as you are doing something interesting, like slicing away the cobwebby connective tissue (fascia) between muscles, you CAN survive a three hour lab.*
2. Histology lab is nice. It's clean, it's peaceful, you get a comfy swivel chair to sit on.
3. Your locker will smell forevermore of formaldehyde once you leave your labcoat in there.

Yesterday I learned that I officially know nothing about anatomy. I was good up until I had to identify the greater tubercle of the humerus. "The what-of-the--oh, I'm supposed to know that?" It had never occurred to me that I would be foiled by the complexity of a single bone. The darn thing has, like, a dozen parts! And it's the easy one.

It looks like, for the most part, people are done with excessive sociability. The first few days, you have to introduce yourself to everyone and try to remember horribly difficult things, like what their names are. Now that the classes are starting, we have more important things to remember. Like, when is lunch? Socializing now entails only knowing enough about your lab partners to remember which one has the bone box.

And the last new thing today: the joy of a nat across the road. Finally, reaching the place of exercise takes less time than the exercise itself. I went swimming. It was good. It wiped out the formaldehyde smell.

*EDIT: Four years later I now know I was having some major health issues at this time that made it physically challenging to stand for an hour, but their onset had been so subtle I hadn't realized when I wrote this that three hours, while not easy, was not leaving my classmates pale, weak and wondering how they were going to survive the semester. That was all the other classes.

Day Two

And where is Day One, you ask?

Well, that was yesterday, y'see. That was all orientation games and eating tacos, waaay too many cookies, and signing up for every club the vet school offers. There are fifteen, no kidding. But no vet schoolish stuff, per se. The closest we came was the carefully timed attack of the cute, fluffy, up-for-adoption puppy. Those sneaky vets from the clinic brought her around during the tacos, while people's guard was down in anticipation of food.

Today was bones in the anatomy lab. Each group got a box with bones from one side of a dog skeleton. My group dumped the bones out on the table, picked out as many as we could (5) and spent the next hour trying to decide what the other 30 or so were. Vertebrae? Oh, definitely. The question is whether any given piece was cervical, thoracic, or lumbar. Or coaxal. Or not actually from the backbone at all. We had that little problem with the atlas, which I'm still not sure what it is.

Later, after the scheduled activities, a good chunk of the student body ventured out to the Union. I think most of them were after the beer, but a good minority recognized the true purpose of socializing on the Terrace, which is to provide an excuse for ice cream. Raspberry cheesecake shall haunt my dreams...I got my fave, choc chip cookie dough, but a taste of the raspberry severely shook my resolve.

Being vet students who are not yet privy to each others' deepest secrets (like what do you really think of your lab partners), the conversations were terrific. Lots of horror stories about pitbulls and reminiscing about undergrad physics exams.

Glass breaking as a summer pursuit

At the beginning of the summer I dropped a glass mixing bowl. It shattered and I spent the next hour picking glass out of shag carpet (yeah...if it had fallen in the kitchen, I could have swept it up. If it had fallen in the living room, it probably wouldn't have broken. But no, I had to drop it at the doorway.)

Then midway through summer, my sister was playing fetch with the dog and broke a window. Once again, glass all over the kitchen floor.

But now I have done one better. I have exploded a pie plate. Replete with pie.

*hitting head on wall*

Just a word to the wise--do not heat up the burner when there's a pie sitting on it. Glass goes boom.

Letter to a Fourth Year

Dear Vet Student Self:

In a few years, you will start your final year of school, and with that will come rotations. You will be one of those blue-garbed, stethoscope-carrying people of authority. It will probably be very cool and utterly exhausting, and your brain will be so full of medical miscellany that the fact you can still walk in a straight line will amaze us all. Actually, walking in a straight line may be a bit of a stretch, but we can always hope.

In any case, you won't be in any condition to remember the poor, downtrodden kennel workers. This letter is to remind you of the things that us downtrodden kennel workers would like all fourth year students to do while they're garnering clinic experience.

1. Thou shalt mark it on the cage card when thou hast fed thy caseload.

We don't mind feeding the dogs in the morning (it makes them like us, after all), but we'd rather not have you pop in two minutes later, gasp, and say "But I already fed him, and if he eats any more his colon will explode!"

2. Thou shalt arrive early enough to take your patient out before he hath an accident.
Double-plus bonus: we can clean while you walk him, and we don't have to clean as much. And the kennels won't smell like dog poo. We're talking 7 am here.

3. Thou shalt give thy patient enough blankets, but not too many (three is good).
If thou bringest in thy own dog for days in a row, leave a card saying "save" and maybe clean that kennel on your own time. It's not that we mind the pets, it's just...there's sometimes a lot of kennels to clean.

4. Thou shalt clean up after exceptionally messy patients (optional).
This one just makes the kennel crew like you.

5. Thou shalt explain thy patient's bizarre health conditions to the curious kennel workers.
Half of us are pre-vets. We LIKE gory detail. Oo, and you knowing who we are is also cool.

6. Thou shalt occasionally thank the kennel crew for their hard work.
It's not usually all that hard, but it is messy and smelly and necessary.

Other things come to mind, such as
the nice people in CCU who consolidate the overnight garbage from all the bins;
picking up the poo from your patient out on dogwalk;
noting that you the student will feed a dog that needs special handfeeding;
piling the bags of soiled laundry along the wall, rather than in the mop room doorway.

But those are little things. The main things are getting here early enough to take the dog on a walk before its bladder fails, and marking whether you have fed (or will feed) your patient.

On behalf of kennel workers, thank you! And (when you get there) enjoy your last year of vet school!

Sincerely,
Your kennel worker self.

How it looks from here

Photographic proof! 170 reunited with her calf, the cows and calves enjoying the pasture, and, Yes, the hen has that many chicks (and there are more running around elsewhere).

On call already?

Diagnosis: sick calf
Treatment: repeated poking with needles and tubes

I got back to my apartment after work on Saturday, wanting nothing but to sleep for an hour or two. My mom calls, and there's a sick sick calf at home. Since I'm the vet service for anything that doesn't need a real vet, I had to go home. It was just like being on call, and I haven't even started vet school yet! I forced myself awake, and talked my boyfriend into accompanying me home, and we went to see what the problem was.

The calf had a temperature and was listless. So listless that I probably could have given her the shot of antibiotics without sitting on her, but not quite so listless that she was going to swallow the sulfa drugs on the first try. The sulfa drugs come in the form of blue boluses, which you break in half before stuffing down the calf's throat...I had to give her 4 halves. I thought I had all of them down, but then I peered into her mouth and, surprise! 4 blue chunks that she was ready to spit out. On the second try I got her to swallow them all. And then we tubed her with electrolytes, which look like nothing so much as Tang.

I voted to stay at home and sleep, which meant the next morning I had to get up at 5 am to drive in to work. There were rather a lot of kennels to clean, for a Sunday. Thank goodness--otherwise I would have felt that going in was a waste. The calf, meanwhile, was still listless, though she was oddly eager to drink water from a bucket. Not normal behavior for a 3-week old. At least her mom hung around most of the day. Sometimes the cows don't do such a good job of keeping an eye on their calves. It was just as well that she went off to graze later, though. We tubed the calf with powerade, the electrolyte-substitute, and gave her a shot of Banamine. Banamine just to make her feel better.

This morning I found her in the wrong pasture. She had tried to follow her mom, I think, and wandered under the wrong wire. I escorted her at a slow walking pace all the way across the pasture. Her mom, whose pacience had been exhausted by yesterday's fast, stayed where she was and only occasionally gave an encouraging moo, through a mouthful of grass.

The final installation of shots was a single Nuflor injection this evening. This time I had to catch the calf, and I'm afraid she won't forgive me this time. Nuflor is a nasty sort of thing--super thick, and she needed a lot of it. At least I didn't have to force feed her any more energy drinks.

Leisure days

Switching back and forth between work and home has been...unenviable. After about a day at home, I hate to leave. The farm is quiet, expansive, everything is growing--the garden needs some more weeding--and I like knowing what the weather is just by taking two steps out the door. In town, houses and roads break the great outdoors into tiny bits. Even once I go outside, it's still like peering through a keyhole.

And then I spend a day in town, and coming home to collapsed sheds and weeds and cows just scraping by on our scant pasture is depressing as all get out. So. I start school in two and a half weeks, which will spell the end of all my current lifestyle quandaries. I'll have new ones instead! Like, are my boyfriend and I actually compatible in the same apartment? And will I be around enough for it to matter?

I worked out an allocation of my hours for a typical week. Start with 168 hours in a week. Take out 56 for sleeping (8 hours a night) and 50 for the time I'm in classes or labs. That leaves me with 62 hours. Going with the 2-5 hours study time per 1 hour class time (class, no labs, equals about 25 hours a week), means that I need to spend a minimum of 50 hours a week studying. There's not enough time in the week for a higher average than 2.5 hours per class. Scary. As it is, I maybe get an hour a day to eat, travel, exercise, and maintain cordial relations with Mr. Roommate. And maybe an extra hour off on Saturday for good behavior. I know--I'll go grocery shopping!

Needless to say, my real schedule will be far more chaotic and haphazard. But I am looking forward to it, even while I'm fully appreciating my current leisure.

I'm gonna miss my dog, I know. I wish I could take him to school with me, but this is out of the question because: 1. He is a psychotic border collie with no house training. And 2. My apartment doesn't let me keep dogs anyway. Too bad in some ways--according to past vet students, pets are great for studying anatomy on a live animal. Ah, well. Perhaps I can schedule in regular visits to home if I count them as study time for anatomy.

But currently on the schedule: leisure time, so long as "leisure" includes things like weeding the squash, yelling at the dogs when they transgress the garden boundaries, moving fences, moving cows, cleaning kennels, and, this afternoon, shopping for school supplies with my mom! And eating equal quantities of watermelon and zucchini brownies. And cherry tomatoes. Nothing in the world is quite as awesome as fresh garden tomatoes. They're like steak with seeds. Juicy, savory, a little sweet.

I can hear the chickens squawking. Probably time to go yell at the dogs again. The sheer number of chicks seems to have bewildered them out of catching any, but they still try.

Hmm, can't hear the hawk today, though. There's a young hawk living in one of the oaks, who likes to fly the air currents and yells the whole time. From dawn to dark, you can hear him: "Eee! Eee! Mom, lookitme, I'm flying!"

When lambs calve, and other oddities

Vet school starts in two and a half weeks, and I've entered the giddy contemplation stage. Attendant to this is a compulsion to read blogs by vet students, and once I did that there was nothing for it but I must have one for my own. Yes! I too shall blog. Consistently, even, maybe. Though let's not be hasty. Let us remember what happened to the food blog (three entries total).

But anyway. The cows are out in the pasture where they're supposed to be, the calves are more or less on the right side of the fence with the cows. The dogs are hassling the chickens again. I have had to rethink my stance on broody hens. I hate tossing a mound of eggs out when I have no clue how close to hatching they are...but as a result we have a serious infestation of chicks. Thirty? Forty? Even Danny's getting tired of chasing them, and he's an obsessive compulsive Border Collie! Every now and then I hear a squawk from outside and have to run out, scream "DANNY!!" and wait until he bounces into view and sees me: "What?!"