Cleancleanclean

Cleaning is proving to be a challenge. Yesterday was the easy bit--shuffling stuff from the living room until it was all in respective piles. Turns out it's hard to get beyond that point. Every surface is dusty, and choosing a spot to start sweeping is harder than it looks (the more motile dust bunnies escape to all four corners. Some of them take refuge on the carpet, which means I'm going to have to vaccuum too. I just vaccuumed a month ago!)

I also have a lot of recycling and garbage to take down to the basement. This sounds less intimidating than it really is. To take anything to the basement requires the unlocking and wrenching open of one door, traversing the stairs, and unlocking and shoving open a second door. It's not truly strenuous, but around the third trip I get really tired of the doors smugly slamming themselves shut as soon as I let go of the handle.

I took a break to make spritz cookies. I found the recipe in a batch of post-it notes on the refrigerator, which I think have been there for two years. Yum, spritz. Butter! I ate three or four and my tongue went numb, which I think means metronidazole is incompatible with almond extract. Pity. It's probably more important for me to finish the antibiotics than the cookies.

At least there's lots of commercial-free Christmas music on the radio!

Merry Christmas!

I'm on call today! I plan to get a lot of cleaning done. Due to the weather's decision to festively glaze every surface with ice, I won't be going anywhere (unless I get called in, of course). I got Christmas dinner though--my dad decided we were going to have roast, so I went home yesterday and helped prepare it (and eat it). Traditionally we have Yorkshire Beef on Christmas Eve. Yorkshire beef is essentially sloppy joe covered with eggy custard and cheese. It is delicious. But prime roast is better.

I got most of my grades back. Still waiting for Pathology (not expecting anything stellar, just hoping to pass). It seems that I got a low B in each class. Wait...I got an AB in Epidemiology. It doesn't surprise me terribly, but I had hoped that the ancillary work in some of the classes would have compensated a bit more for the exams. Or vice versa.

But next semester...! I shall OWN parasitology! And clin path! Well, maybe not clin path. At least not "own", per se. More...borrow on a month-per-month basis?

But today: Christmas songs on the radio and exhaustive cleaning! And maybe a trip to the clinic.

Finals tomorrow...

Why aren't I studying? AAargh!

Seriously...I spent an hour wandering around a bookstore yesterday and more time than that today on things that had nothing to do with virology or bacteriology. Suddenly the most important thing is making dinner?! Self-control, please!

Rose Waaler

The note-taking continues!

Detection of Rheumatoid Factor
Rheumatoid factor=antibody to antibody.
Sheep red blood cells are reacted with appropriate concentration of anti-SRBC antibodies, made from rabbit or dog (odd, but apparently it works).
Appropriate concentration means it won't quite agglutinate.
Dilutions of the patient's serum are added to antibody coated SRBCs, known as sensitized SRBCs.
If the patient's serum contains RF, the RF cross links with anti SRBC antibodies and the red blood cells agglutinate. If there's no antibodies in the patient, there's no agglutination.

Colostral and milk immunoglobulins:
colostrum: IgG > IgA > IgM
non-ruminant milk: IgA > IgG > IgM
ruminant milk: IgC >IgA > IgM

Hypersensitivies

Using the blog for notes today. (Why? Because. It's here. I like to try new note taking formats.)

Type I:

antibody: IgE
antigen: foreign
effector mechanism: Activation of mast cells and mediators
skin test is available
Time to onset: seconds to minutes
Examples of the disease: include hay fever and anaphylaxis.

Type II:

antibody: IgG and IgM
antigen: Cell or tissue antigens AND cell surface receptors work as antigens.
Effector mechanisms: Complement activation, which leads to phagocytosis; also, cell signalling altered by antibody.
No skin test available.
Minutes to hours for onset.
Examples of disease: transfusion reactions, autoimmune hemolytic anemia, pemphigus vulgaris, and some drug allergies.
Other diseases include Grave's disease, myasthenia gravis, and type 2 diabetes.

Type III:

antibody: IgG aand IgM
antigen: Immune complexes work as the antigen; they activate complement system and phagocytosis. "Why would phagocytosis or complement activation of immune defenses lead to tissue damage? Why is the pathology of mycoplasma immune-mediated? It's because mycoplasms are bound so tightly to the cells that the immune defense can't differentiate. It's bystander damage."
skin test: Arthus reaction (inject antigen and circulating antibodies bind, forming an immune complex and resulting in 'weal and flare').
Inappropriate immune response to antigen, and also excessive.
How do allergy shots, desensitization, work? Kicks the body into T helper 1 response, with IgG. This moves it away from TH2, where IgE activate mast cells for massive degranulation.
6-8 hours to see reaction.
Examples: rheumatoid arthritis, serum sickness, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). What is serum sickness? Let's say someone with hepatitis is discovered to have helped prepare food; everyone who ate some is given a massive dose of anti-serum to mop up the hepatitis. (And yes, I know hepatitis is technically just a word for unhappy livers)
Not all hypersensitivities are auto immune.

Type IV
Antibody: none
antigens: foreign, cell antigen...or cell associated.
Effector mechanism: macrophage activation by TH1, plus inflammation
Or CTL mediated cytotoxicity (and inflammation) (if antigen is cell associated).
Skin test: most certainly. It takes 48-72 hours (though the TB skin test in cattle can be nicely simulated in under an hour by using chicken blood cells. On the other hand, you can also induce anaphylaxis, hypersensitivity type I, with chicken cells...apparently reversible).
Examples: contact dermatitis, tuberculin reaction, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis. CTL mediated: acute graft rejection ("omg alien invasion kill kill kill!" scream the CTLs)

Hemolytic disease in newborns: the mother makes antibodies to the fetal antigens (just think of the fetus as an allograft; this is why pregnant women are immunosuppressed). This is a problem for horses; the mare concentrates antibodies in her colostrum. The foal is born without any problems and nurses, and ingests what is essentially anti-foal colostrum. The complicated bit is that this doesn't happen with the first foal she has by that stallion; it takes that first pregnancy to introduce her immune system to the foreign genetics. By breeding her to a different stallion each time, she never builds up the antibody response. The other option is to feed the foal colostrum from a different mare. HOWEVER, the replacement colostrum should be from a mare on the same farm. Horses develop very localized immunity; the endemic pathogens of one farm are not the same as what may be endemic on a different farm.

Doctors and doctors-to-be

Nowadays when I have a doctor's appointment, I find an opportunity to tell the doctor that I'm a vet student. I'm sure some level of my brain does this because it doesn't want the doctor to think it is a silly brain for using medical terms. Everyone knows that patients find medical terminology to be incomprehensible jargon, so the patients who try putting forward a vocab word or two of their own probably spent an hour of quality time with some medical websites.

But Mayo's help page does not a doctor make...so I try to clarify where I got my information. Otherwise, we get conversations like this:

Me: "So, I suppose one of the things that could be causing stomach pain, if it's not just stress related, could be Crohn's?"
Doctor: "Ah, so you've been doing some reading online, then?"
"Um...we went over it in class a month ago. Did I mention what I'm in school for?"

Granted, vets aren't supposed to diagnose human disease. We had a session on this today: if a woman comes in with a ringworm positive cat, and she has what is obviously a ringworm lesion on her forearm, you are allowed to diagnose the cat and start it on treatment, but you can't tell the woman anything beyond, "Maybe you should go see your doctor."

How to relax (or not)

Perhaps reading about how smallpox hasn't really been eradicated after all is not the best way to relax. However, the fun part of reading "Demon in the Freezer" is realizing that now I know some of the techniques used in those high-biosecurity labs.

It's been a hard week, what with getting exams back and having papers to turn in. I reviewed my e-mails to non-vet people one day, as well, and found out my writing has deteriorated badly since the beginning of the semester. As the months go by, everything unrelated to infectious disease becomes incoherent and disjointed, and I start talking about salmonella and flaviviridae with increasing fervor.

I talked to the supervisor at work about fixing the on-call schedule so we don't get called in for twenty-four hour stretches. The alternative was probably going to be me giving two month notice and resigning. In some ways, that was an attractive option. I find being on-call to be a loathsome experience. The pager is like a black box of portable stress. If it doesn't go off, I'm worried I might have missed it, so I have to keep checking for the little blinking light. There's always the one long moment where you look at it and wait for it to blink.

If it does go off, that's the next four hours (at minimum).
Some of the people who no longer do this job assure me that, well yes, there are crazy times when you get called in the entire night every time you're on call. But then there are stretches where nothing happens at all! They say this as if it makes everything okay. "There might be times you don't get called in, isn't that awesome?!" Although to be honest, getting called in is not really the problem. Surgeries are exciting, and you learn a little more every time you help with one. No, the problem is cleaning up after the surgery, because then there is no more excitement and it usually takes about as long as the surgery itself. I like to think that it is a less important part of education at this stage; at any rate, I would rather be studying bacteria.

Pathology 1, me 1

After about a month, we got back our scores on the previous path exam, on which I got an amazing beyond-a-B A! And then we got back our scores on the most recent exam, which completely kicked my butt and handed me an amazingly low 64. Which once again puts me at the very bottom of the class. Granted, this was the section where I was horribly sleep deprived for most of the lectures, had no lab partner for half the labs (because she didn't "like the disgusting pictures"), and was called in for fifteen hours a few days before the exam. I shouldn't blame my lab partner, of course, but seeing as she obviously did better on the exam than I did, I feel a little bitter.

Oh well, back to work.

TGIT

I am enjoying the absence of people. My parents headed off to Vegas the night I got called in for five hours. I gripe SOOO much when I get called in, my poor boyfriend doesn't know if he's supposed to tell me when the clinic has left a message with him (I was on my way home and missed the call). And then I spend the first hour going "hatehatehate", the second hour "I'm missing bellydance, aargh!" and then the rest of the evening is fine because I've missed bellydance and how much worse could it possibly get? Well, there weren't any emergency back surgeries that came in, so it didn't get any worse, but I was fully expecting one might roll in any moment. As opposed to weekend before last, where I got to spend ten hours of quality time with the surgeon and anesthesiologist. And an additional five hours of quality time with the cartloads and cartloads of bloody instruments that all needed to be cleaned. I got home at five a.m.

But now I'm not on call for a couple of weeks, which lightens my heart. As for today, no school! As I mentioned, the parental units are off seeking sunshine, and my boyfriend went home with his family, which leaves me with the farm full of dogs and cats (who I can hug because my cat-allergic boyfriend is not around). The bedrooms at the farm were cold, so last night I slept on the couch, which Nanner acting as a very localized heat blanket. Nanner has really mastered the art of staying inside as soon as it gets cold. She finds the person least likely to kick her out and cuddles up quietly, and if they show signs of impatience she starts purring. Since I was the only one home, it was an easy sell.

School switched into high gear the last month, or maybe I did. I think I have passed the most recent round of exams with grades more toward the middle of the pack, which pleases me greatly. A's are awesome, but I am perfectly happy with B's. Even a high C does not offend my sensibilities. (Really hoping the bacteriology exam turned out at least that well). About a month ago I had one weekend with nothing else scheduled, but to study...it was bliss. Since then it has been more of a marathon, with me swearing on a daily basis to never volunteer again, since there's always something else that comes up too. So I'm not too distressed at having nothing going this weekend, although I have a long list of errands I would like to run. Alas, I do not want to go anywhere near the stores tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure it's not a good idea to buy glasses online.

And now I have to go take care of all the animals I promised to take care of today.

Business club reboot

Sugar is my drug of choice. Mmmm, candy corn...

I'm learning lots of interesting things while trying to reboot the business club for the vet school. First off, it's harder to reboot an organization than you'd think. The deadlines for normal paperwork all passed over summer, so I have to basically do everything from scratch. The students who were in charge last year are now fourth years, and thus, totally inaccessible. Yet at the same time, there's this huge backlog of e-mails and contacts and bank statements that are helping me feel like I'm doing something moderately useful.

The thing about business clubs is that lots of people are willing to help sponsor, but no one wants to run it. Fortunately I had the lesson in undergrad that you can achieve a lot just by walking into the main office and requesting things. So I have managed to put off some of the paperwork, but now it's starting to loom.

Probably even more fortunately, there's lots of people in the industry who want to see the club working, and there's nothing more motivating than actual adults/veterinarians taking an interest in what I'm doing.

So I write lots of e-mails and eat candy corn and try to remember I have to study too.

Immunology, you're not my friend*

*to the tune of Rubber Ducky

I came to the conclusion half way through the immuno exam that the only way I was going to survive the post-exam anxiety was to not think about it. Actually, I have this nice rationalization about how the professors gave us absolutely no direction for studying, and the exam was written a bit erratically and may have completely missed important points (that I knew) while focusing on silly little things (that I may not have known) like whether the membrane attack complex uses C5b, C6, C7, C8, or if it uses C4a, C6, C7, C8. The latter incidentally, and I got it wrong. Same thing with convertases of the classical and alternative pathways.

So I made chocolate cake.

Then I came back to it, and now I see: How could I have been so foolish? The right answer was so easy to arrive at, and so completely necessary to a sound understanding of immunology!

After all, the pathway goes along the lines of:

C1 cleaves itself. C1s cleaves C2 and C4. C4 is now C4b. C4b and C2b make C3.

Meanwhile, C4b2b cleaves C3!

C3b joins C4b2b to be C4b2b3b...did we mention C5 yet? Well, OBVIOUSLY C4b2b3b cleaves C5, and now we have C5b, which clearly shows why the answer to the other question was C5b, C6, C7, C8, and C9. And since this was the classical pathway, that's why you were wrong. The alternative pathway uses C3bBb. That's a B, not a 2. (sheesh, get it right)

But I was a silly student and didn't realize that we were supposed to know the alphabet in this new, convoluted form. I just had it summarized in my notes as "Legos."

Probably it would help if our prof used something other than the detailed diagrams from our textbooks. Lecture becomes exponentially harder to follow when you don't know which part of the twenty-piece jigsaw you're on.

(In case you were wondering what this was all about, the C#letters are tiny molecules in your bloodstream that eventually assemble themselves into the molecular equivalent of an awl, and then they go punch holes in bacteria. It's wonderful.)

Called In

I got done at the clinic around midnight. The clean-up was easier once I found the second autoclave was full of freshly sterilized instruments, meaning I didn't have to run a load myself. On the other hand, the drill defeated me. I wiped all the blood off it, but the mysterious combination of pulling and twisting necessary to disassemble it eluded me.

Around eight o'clock a newly spayed dog had dehisced, and I had gotten a call, "Can you come in?" Seeing as I had been still standing in the surgery ward, I guess technically the answer was "no". Anyway, it was a 4th year's surgery dog from earlier in the day. The resident was delighted to get to do a surgery. It wasn't a huge undertaking, though. She was worried, in fact, that maybe she'd mistakenly called for surgery on a dog that was fine. But to her relief (if not the 4th year's), the student had sutured a layer of fat instead of the linea alba. So yay, there was something to fix!

I don't usually meet the dogs before they're anesthetized. This one was a very thin Rottweiler, from the rescue group. She seemed very sweet--granted, she had just woken up a few hours ago and was sedated again already.

So that was last night! I tormented the other student techs by telling them about it today. No one really likes to hear that someone got called in--it implies there might be a trend!
However, aside from huge amount of cleaning I ended up doing, it was a pretty decent experience.

Not that I want to repeat it every time I'm on call.

Tapir necropsy

So a tapir died last week and I saw the necropsy! It was exciting, although after three hours of standing in a necropsy lab the excitement is maybe a little blunted. It was a really big tapir, about the size of a small cow, and its ribcage was just cavernous. It had an assortment of problems that I can rattle off pretty fast now, since the pathologists have been presenting the case to afternoon necropsy rounds for a week, and to my pathology class for lab. Nephritis, lung adhesions, acute pneumonia, and lesions on the tongue. Not to mention atherosclerosis. How an herbivore gets atherosclerosis is a really fun question that the pathologists haven't found a sure answer to yet.

The other thing with tapirs is that they're hindgut fermenters, very similar to horses. This one had a whole bunch of enteroliths in its colon. They ranged from bean size to big marble size, and look just like rocks (until you accidently drop one on the floor and are greeted by the redolent smell of manure).

A difference between year 1 and year 2

First year, I was so delighted to be in vet school that it took until second semester for me to have the days where you say, "I hate vet school."

I'm not having those days yet, two weeks into second year, but the quality of joy when I think "I'm in vet school" is definitely tinged by near-panic. When sitting in lecture, the thought hangs over me: "They expect us to know this stuff." Worse, I expect myself to know it. Not for the test, because the test is just the tool to see if I know it. No, I expect the facts and outlines to magically transmute themselves into usable knowledge sometime between now and fourth year.

Actually, that was last year. Last year I got to be a clueless first year, and all the mysteries would unveil themselves at the proper time. Now it looks like the mysteries like it right where they are, thank you very much, and shouldn't I be studying the five billion ways a carcinoma can occur? And spending afternoons in the clinic, so that I see how real medicine makes use of that knowledge? And practicing people skills, because it's not all scientific jargon that makes a vet?

Excuse me, I have to go panic. I mean, study.

Why I just paid for wool

*Loooong pause*

It was soft?

I went to the Sheep and Wool Festival. Two big barns were full of vendors selling yarn, spinning supplies, and innumerable balls of batting. And lots of stuff with sheep on it. And some alpaca stuff. Even some angora rabbit stuff.

It was with some baffllement I realized I was carrying a skein of alpaca-merino blend. I had made it all of three booths from the point of purchase before the thought rose unbidden: "I just spent most of my money on this. Why??"

It didn't help that at the time I was passing some really shiny, pretty bamboo yarn. It was cheaper than what I had just bought! The yarn across the aisle was cheaper than what I had just bought! Why on earth had I sprung for this reddish grayish twist of fiber, when there were so many other gleaming options?

I think it was because it was soft. Alpaca wool and really fine merino doesn't feel like scratchy wool, it's just sort of kushy and almost silky.

That and the woman who sold me the stuff was very nice, and suggested that it was good yarn for weaving. I hadn't told her I was looking for weaving stuff. It took me by surprise. I hadn't caught on yet that the heddle I had just bought and was carrying under one arm was an obvious giveaway. I might as well have carried a sign: I'm a weaver! I am a sucker for weaveable yarn!

While knitters just shell out for the yarn, and maybe the occasional knitting needle, weavers require a whole lot more equipment, bigger batches of yarn, and more accessories in general. Ergo, weavers have the potential to spend way more money, which may explain why salespeople were suddenly very nice to me.

Unfortunately the fact I only bought one skein meant I needed more yarn, to go with it. I couldn't afford more alpaca wool, so I went with cotton. It's not nearly as soft, but at least I am clear in my mind of why I bought it. To go with the first skein!

Why wool pays (but not to you)

(School has started, yet I continue to go on about fiber arts)

I'm looking forward to the festival next week, which is essentially an opportunity to spend huge amounts of money on yarn. Since I have very limited amounts of money, I went to some of the vendors' websites to see what sort of budget I've got. For instance, I like the look of the wool-bamboo blends that are out there.

35 dollars a skein. That's about one small scarf.

I made a really interesting sound when I found that.

Still, that's a fancy bamboo blend. I checked the price on more normal yarn, and even that is listed around 28 dollars.

So, let's say you don't feel like spending a ton of money on pretty yarn, but you fortuitously own sheep (or llamas. Or camels! I'm not picky). Getting your own wool processed is cheaper, right? Well, as long as you give them an impeccably clean fleece (20$ an hour for skirting it, otherwise), it only costs 5$ a pound to wash it. And a further 7$ a pound to card it.

So we're at 12$ a pound, still a steal by comparison. Except it's not actually spun into anything usable yet, and it's still the same color as the sheep. Or camel.

Did I mention there's a 50 pound suggested minimum?

Then, to spin it, that's positively cheap, just 2$ a pound, but getting it dyed pretty colors more than makes up for it, around 12 $ a pound.

So, let's see:

washing: 5

carding: 7

spinning: 2

dyeing: 12

Total is 26 dollars a pound, a skein is typically half a pound. So congratulations, you've gotten your yarn at half price (a total of about $1250, not including any sundry processing fees).

And what's more, you now have forty pounds of it.

*I don't actually mind the price of good yarn, though I am of course regretful I can't afford much of it. I suspect there's a healthy profit margin, seeing as raw wool prices have been tanked for the last decade, but letting someone else deal with the steps is fine with me. For weaving I actually need much better yarn than I could possibly handspin.

**prices obtained from Briar Rose Fibers and Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mill, both very good suppliers and supporters of wool industry. There's huge variation in prices, though. While these are pretty representative, they are not the final word.

Yep, I'm makin' a scarf!

It's fall

This morning, my contact lens solution was cold. Sure sign of winter coming.

Currently things are dull, after a flustered morning. I discovered around 9 am that I was supposed to work at 10 am, and after one false start (I had to turn around and drive home to get my penicillin, since strep is a bad thing and we don't want to encourage it to set up shop on my heart valves) I finally made it in around 10:30. But it turns out we only have one surgery in the OR today anyway. *frustration, tears, whimpering*. If anything turns up, the day will return to frantic haste status.

The thing with strep throat...so, I found out about two weeks after the appointment that I had trace amounts of strep virus. The doctor told me, over the phone, that I should go ahead with the antibiotics, even though I seem to finally be recovered. I hate taking antibiotics, and if I was fully recovered why did I need them? Just take them, he said.

Second-opinion time! I asked my dad (a vet). He said strep likes to catch a ride down to heart valves and after a period of lying low, causes endocarditis. In other words, I'm now dutifully taking penicillin. The moral: explaining the medicine leads to greater patient compliance!

(Further internet research turns up factoids about streptococcus pyogenes, or 'group A': it's pretty contagious, it can lead to sinus and tonsil infections, and more ominously rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever is the complication that can cause the damage to the heart, since it involves nodules being deposited in all sorts of places, and they can cause scarring wherever they end up. Thanks, mayo clinic website!)

School rumbling on the horizon

So.

Second year!

Oh boy.

Last year around this time I was contemplating the mysteries awaiting me as a first year vet student, the challenges, the joys, the large amount of cleaning my apartment required. This time, much more sanguine about the apartment. I didn't know how exactly vet school worked, going in, but as time passed I found that, as harrowing as it was, I loved it. I have trouble with studying enough, of making it through long lectures and labs with my attention span intact, but it's the sort of challenge that is exhilirating when I succeed (mainly because if I do a good job at it, my brain goes into its happy place and I find myself with a lot of really weird cartoons illustrating my notes, and only a vague sense of time having gone by).

If I were going into first year again, there are some things I would try to do better. I would be far more obsessive about anatomy (though goodness knows I was pretty obsessive the first time around, it just didn't feel like it). I would try to sketch everything, since I found out a little too late that I learn things by drawing pictures of them. Besides, all those missed opportunities to publish a complete anatomy of the cow. I would make flash cards for neuro after every lecture. I would actually USE said flash cards. I might still slack in nutrition, but I would try to more wisely slack in pharmacology. More flash cards (again) and fewer charts. Charts were lovely for histo, lousy for pharm. I would still take that one afternoon off early from lab to go to the zoo. I would think long and hard before taking on quite so many bloody electives second semester.

Of course, most of the things I learned that I should do don't easily translate to second year (at least I don't think so). No gross anatomy, so sketching animal parts is probably out.

We only have one lab that runs all afternoon, though there's always opportunities to stay to the end or to skip out (mentally if no other way presents itself). I learned you should always stay to the end (although a judicious walk to the bathroom that just happens to involve collapsing on a couch for a thirty second time-out is sometimes necessary).

I have a shelf full of index cards awaiting my loving attention--that, at least, I'm sure will be a common theme.

Things I'm worried about not doing so well with: being utterly fascinated with everything. Getting to class on time (usually with three seconds to spare).

Managing to exercise every day. I did so well all year, and then summer came...

And things I want to improve: food management. I'd like to avoid some of the more dangerous of the free lunches (pizza hut's idea of pasta is a macabre joke).

Studying! Always there to improve!

And remembering people's names and actually studying with them. Heh. Found out the hard way that there are some things you can't learn by yourself (thy name is neuro...).

Finally, I'd just like to survive this year of being a surgery tech part time. I think it was a won-der-ful lear-ning ex-per-ience over summer. I think it's decidedly not my career of choice, and I say this now that I have gained a rudimentary level of competence. I'd like to get to a commendable level of competence, this year, but I'm afraid I'll have to muster the enthusiasm on a case by case, day by day basis.

Scarf done!

Warning: weaving jargon follows


I finished weaving this the other night. It's destined for Sister #2, who was visiting when I set the loom up and will be visiting again, probably about the time I get around to setting the loom up again for a second scarf. This time there will be less joy of discovery (cor, it's a piece o'cloth!). Maybe. I am still a rank beginner, so I'm sure I can discover some new problems to overcome. See the diagonal stripe? Turns out you end up with a lacy pattern of holes all along the edge. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, I will be putting yarn on the shuttle a whole lot more. It's hard to pass an entire ball of yarn through the narrow passage of threads, but I did not realize how much easier the shuttle makes things until half way through. Not until after the stripe, of course.

Once I use up the rest of the yarn I've got (further lessons of past debacles: don't use fuzzy for the warp!) I can think of other things. I'm tempted by double-weave. This is basically quantum mechanics for a rigid heddle loom: you end up with a folded piece of cloth twice the width of what you'd been weaving. *Oooo, ahhhh* It takes another heddle, though. And pick-up sticks, which I'd never heard of before putzing around online today. See what wonderful things vacation inspires?

Fiber arts

Yay, finished my very short weaving and now my loom is free again! I'm taking it over to the fiber store to see if they have any nice (and cheap, please) thread I can restring with for a bigger project. And hopefully they'll help me restring. This last one I did on my own was all askew, so the heddle was rubbing against the frame on one side. I am less than talented with these sorts of things. I have lots of half-formed plans to weave cloth for use in bellydance and ren faire costumes, but first let's just weave the cloth, yes?

I have also discovered Tunisian crochet, which is awesome. It's essentially knitting with a crochet hook. Crochet hooks have always made way more sense to me, and it never seemed fair that all the sorts of yarn things I wanted to make required knitting needles. That or incredibly confusing patterns. Doilies? Oh yeah. There are some lovely lacy patterns out there, but way beyond my skill level (what, read a pattern?!)

This has nothing to do with vet school, since this is stuff I never get to play with during school. But I still have a month of summer left to be crafty and musical and well-read. I'm working on War and Peace at my boyfriend's bequest. I'm on page 40! Keep in mind I'm also reading Dancing to the Edge of the Precipice (biography of a courtier from French revolution era), Man on Earth (all the anthropology I never got around to learning), and various sci-fi/fantasy books. Mainly Patricia Briggs, because it allows me to indulge in the current vampire/werewolf fad in literature without feeling like I drop five IQ points after every chapter.

"I'm a fawn, I'm a fawn..."

Someone was mooing all last night. She had shut up by the time I went out this morning, but I suspected it might be 170. Partly because when we palpated cows a couple of weeks ago, she was so pregnant the calf practically came up and shook my hand. But mainly because when I walked out this morning she tried to kill the dogs. Granted, Danny was pretty much asking for it (don't take a border collie into a pasture full of mama cows. He has no sense and they have no tolerance), but still, 170 has been pretty easy going until today. She was looking around with a sort of strained expression, like she had left something--say, a calf--somewhere and couldn't remember where exactly.

I gave up on waiting for her to remember and walked the fences. And, way off to one side of the big pasture we just opened up yesterday, was a calf lying half under the fence. The grass was really deep and he was pretending to be a fawn. I hauled him out from under the fence, at which point he decided this fawn thing wasn't working out and bolted away across the pasture, through a fence, and into a huge patch of thistle. These would be the six foot high thistles. The calf plopped down and resumed being a fawn.

I yelled for 170, who amazingly enough responded (all the cows were hanging around out of sight among the trees on Roundtop). She came walloping down the hill (walloping: like galloping, but with a full udder) , through the gate, and headed toward the far side of the pasture, so I think she finally remembered where she'd left the calf. Only now the calf was in a patch of thistle pretending he didn't exist.

"Yo, 170," I said. "Your calf is here." I pointed. She didn't get it. She did stop moving, though, so I started in through the thistles to get the calf up. He exploded out of the thistles and ran toward the gate. I ran in the opposite direction, just in case 170 decided it was all my fault and took a detour to thump me. But she was catching up with her calf, who finally stopped running when he realized milk was now available.

Long story short: cow reunited with calf, person not trampled.

Breeding cows and washing drills

The two days a week of "actual work" seems to be working. Now that I'm more or less trained in at the OR, it's less frightening and painful. I haven't done a stupid thing there for a whole week! (as of tomorrow) By the by, don't put drills and their fancy attachments into the ultrasound (it's a soap bath in addition to the ultrasound bit).

I still have some definite problems with an eight-hour work day. Oh, for a two hour siesta.

The other five days of the week are much more fun. Not only do I get the siesta, I get to play with cows and garden. I've become very nostalgic for the summers I spent training show cows, since there's nothing like dragging a cow around on a lead rope for a couple of hours to make you feel like you've accomplished something in the day. I can't do that now, of course, since the heifers are crazy wild, and I don't have anywhere to show them anyway. But breeding cows is a nice substitute. I get to feel smart that I can identify a cervix via rectal palpation. I only get two weeks to practice though--in July, my job is being outsourced to the bull.

The other good part of breeding cows is that I get to spend so much time just watching them. That's an aspect of vet medicine I feel I'm going to have a lot of trouble with. "What do you mean, work with other people's animals? Without two hours of observation?!"

Plus, I'm spoiled by having very professional cows. We don't keep any cows that kick or shake their heads at us, and you can usually talk them into going through a specific gate. Besides, they're Angus. I'm afraid this has left me with a strong opinion of what a "proper cow" looks like, which makes the far-more prevalent Holstein look like a sad, warped version of a bovine.

Sick and achey

Last Tuesday night I came down with sore throat, and the suckiness has continued apace since then. This weekend was worst, since I was having trouble breathing and had lovely high temps around 100. I blame the slow slow recovery on working a couple of unpleasantly long days, but really I have no clue. Not vet school related at all, but it's having a nasty impact on my plans to finish planting the garden.

Unrelated to being sick, but now adding to the headache: dentist visit. It's been, um, 3 years since my last cleaning (completely unintentional!).  Moral of the story: go to the dentist more frequently than once every three years. My gums hurt like they were just sand blasted. 

Training does not have to equal train wreck

I am relieved to discover that after three days of full time work, I appear to have some idea of what I'm doing as a tech. Of course, now I've come down with a horrendously sore throat and still have the prospect of a two more eleven-hour work days this week, but hey, at least I have today off. The supervisor was terribly worried that I traded off an on-call shift three weeks from now, because how on earth will I get experience working in the OR? Aside from, y'know, the EXTRA DAY THIS WEEK that was the other part of the trade.

I was also glad to hear from my dad that, no, his clinic doesn't tell techs to "just dive in," and leave the training at that. They hire all certified techs, first of all, not random first year vet students, and they still have a very well defined training program the techs go through. 

One of my observations from work yesterday is that, as wonderfully effective as learning through (devastatingly bad) experience is, it means no one is sure what everyone else knows. We're just suppose to train ourselves so well we know everything. So we end up with things like an entire batch of medical equipment to resterilize, because one of the student techs didn't realize that the pointy ends were going to poke through the wrappers. It wasn't me! It was one of the "dive right in" proponents, ironically enough. 

Enough blathering for today. It's time for another dose of vitamin C and hot tea.

Rant

Summer...a time of relaxation and recuperation from a tough semester. Or not. I had been really really hoping I wouldn't get called in on Sunday, since I didn't realize until Friday afternoon that I was going to be on call, and I hadn't spent time learning to be a surgery tech since before exams. 

And let's face it, I never really got a good chunk of training any time over the semester. Pretty much ever since the second week after being hired I've known this was not what I wanted to do, though I'll blame it on the stunning lack of any training program for student surgery techs. How much training do real surgery techs get? I'm sure it's more than "whenever you have a spare moment to be in the clinic." Not to mention "Don't worry, you'll learn it on the job this summer."

Ideally I should have been smart enough to not sign up so quickly and willingly, or at least, in that second week, to have returned to the person who hired me and said, "Look, I didn't fully understand what the job entailed, I have significantly more time committed to labs for class than your other student workers, is there a way to work this out?"

Actually, truly ideally they would give you a chance to shadow someone for a full shift before even hiring, so that they get a student who wants to work there, rather than someone who has been told "It's such a terrific opportunity, it's really easy, all you have to do is [simple, minor time commitment]." And then have a trainee manual, which has all of the relevant information for the job (like, on which one of the multitude of calendars you are supposed to put your on-call contact info, and where to find keys for the supply room).  

What sparked this off was me getting called in on Sunday and being an incompetent idiot. I don't like being an incompetent idiot, even when another student charitably comes in and takes over. I didn't know even how to open the supply room to get the surgery supplies, so it was assumed I don't know how to set up for surgery. Throughout the surgery I found other ways to screw up. At least I knew how to clean the room afterward. Then we were called in again, an hour later, adding up to 8 hours of frustrated efforts to be competent.

Unfortunately I'm the sort of person who generally ascribes all problems to her own failings, so most of the semester I was thinking, "I just need to work harder, it's my fault I'm having so much trouble." Add in lack of people skills and confidence to use them (I've been working on that), which makes asking for help that much more difficult. So it was my own fault I didn't speak up to the (extremely unsympathetic) student in charge of scheduling, my own fault I didn't learn everything I needed to know on the job, and my own fault I was having so much trouble with classes that I was spending a lot of afternoons trying to keep up with school rather than learning how to do a job where I was told "Don't worry, you'll learn it this summer." Well, it turns out I am  learning it this summer, the hard way, inconveniencing other people and really stressing out myself.

As a communications major, it astonishes me that the OR of a well-respected clinic has such a dearth of training policy that an inept student remains inept for so long, and then is expected to know everything they need to when the learning of it is left entirely to chance and the assumed tenacity of the student. There is no manual to refer to, there is no effort made to introduce the student to the job. I did not know that veterinary surgery endorsed the discovery learning method.

Neuro = headache

It's cumulative, too. I spent two hours of studying this morning so freaked out I'm not sure I actually learned anything. There's too much material to just rewrite all my notes, my preferred way to study. So I ran errands and baked cookies (which didn't really quite work out, since I put them in a pan  and the middle didn't cook all the way through, but they're chocolate chip cookies which means it takes a lot more than that to make them inedible. Like, microwaving them and them turning into concrete afterwards. Hm, chewy.) 

Then, this afternoon...

Our wonderful wonderful professors gave us practice questions, a practice lab exam, and access to last year's exam, which when I looked at it caused me to freak out in the first place. But I started in on them anyway. It became obvious to me about five hours ago that nothing else was going to work. The practice questions were all about pinpointing damage to the spinal cord based on reflexes. Whether the dog kicks its leg, etc.

And, it has given me a headache (actually, it was probably the cookies, but ignore that!). I don't usually get headaches. But today it feels like my entire right temporal lobe fell down and bruised itself, with the left lobe cutting in now and then out of sympathy. So more study time down the drain while I hid under blankets, waiting for it to go away. The headache or the neuroanatomy exam, I'm not sure which. 

Thankfully there's a nice stretch of morning before the exam, so I'm going to go study until I fall asleep around midnight. By some miracle the information will all find a place to sit and I will discover I know it all when I start reviewing again tomorrow. 

That's my little pep talk for myself.

P.S. Do you realize the trees are blooming right now? I used to spend lots of time outside, keeping track of things like that. But this time spring went right over my head. It's going to be summer before I have a chance to adapt to temperatures being above 50! I can't even imagine how I'm going to adapt to physical labor again, but I have to if I want tomatoes in unending profusion. Plus the other stuff that grows in the garden, but, y'know, the tomatoes are the important part.

High time for cookies

Large animal anatomy today.

Sometimes you get these exams where you don't know the answers. It's not that you don't know the material. You just spent the last fifteen waking hours maneuvering a textbook's amount of it into your cranium, to say nothing of all the labs since January. But when you look at the pin sticking into the artery, nothing helpful like "Oh, that's the cranial tibial artery," leaps into your head. It's not that you look at it and have no clue. For instance, it's definitely sitting right next to the muscle called the cranial tibial, but wait, is that the cranial tibial artery? Or is this particular artery actually called something else? 

So you just fill out the answers with words that make sense, and hope your brain knew more about what was going on than you did. And then you go home and make cookies. Because with another three days of this sort of thing, cookies are the best defense against going totally bonkers.

Mmm. Now, for the nutrition exam tomorrow...

 

Getting sick just in time for finals

But I swear, it's not swine flu. For one thing, it started before the frantic media did, and secondly, it's pretty much staying at the sore throat and feeling lousy level. For once I actually studied for the majority of the time I was awake, this weekend. Sleep, wake up and study, sleep. As for my favorite recreational activity, grocery shopping...there seems to be no point when all your dietary needs are being met by chicken bouillion cubes and cough drops. The biggest question is whether I'm going to beg off palpating live cows and horses this afternoon. More sleep would be sooo nice.

Exam run-down:
Today was reproductive phys, which was challenging mostly because we have no old exams to look at. The multiple choice q's start out with a complicated set up and then want a fairly nuanced answer, like just how exactly a hormonal supplement is going to affect the a)sperm production b) testosterone c)hyp-pit axis... of a cryptorchid. I think that may have been the worst of it, actually. Although it always worries me when I end up with five b's or c's in a row on the bubble sheet.

Then in two days comes Biochem, scary mainly because it is biochem. That's everything for this week, thankfully. On the other hand, that means Neuro, Anatomy, Radiology, and nutrition are all somehow going to be next week. Anatomy would be most terrifying, except I have spent so much time in lab that I've reached that blissful stage where even arteries and nerves start looking familiar. Instead of "I think that might possibly be the femoral artery but I can't totally be sure because there's so many other whitish tubules in this section," it's more: "Yeah, that looks like a femoral artery. Next!"

Of course, some study is in order. There are, after all, a LOT of whitish tubules in the hindlimb.

Spelling bee--finally, my chance to shine!

Yep, it was a tough contest today. It was between the first years, the second years, and the third years. The words flew through the air with all the speed and agility of parrots (i.e. not all that speedy or agile), but gaffes were few and far  between.  There was one notable exception--"g-h-a-r-i-f-e"? I suspect she might just not have wanted to spell giraffe. 

The third years, whose brains have been subject to three years of vet school and thus are understandably a bit shaky when it comes to something as pedestrian as spelling, fell out first. The first years were definitely in the lead. We still had three out of four from our group, whereas the other two classes had only one student hanging on. There was a tricky moment with 'metzenbaum', which I can spell but not identify (some sort of scissor?). A few more times back and forth (dachshund would have stumped me, but fortunately it went to someone else) and then the last second year mistook a letter. I can't actually remember what the word was, but something like pterygoid or metacarpophalangeal. 

Er. 

Um. 

This is awkward.

But anyway,  I spelled it! And then 'erythropoiesis' was the challenge word, which went fine. Hurrah. 

So now that I've proved I can be my own spell checker, I can go back to studying for exams where everything is multiple choice. 

Repro and biochem, here I come!

Parrots and Ferrets

Monday was random animals day! Also known as physical exam of exotics...they presented us with tortoises (tortoise restraint: hold the shell). 
Snakes: one student got hold of the python and wouldn't let it go...or maybe vice versa.
Rabbits: if it grinds its teeth that means it likes you? 
Ferrets: What a charming carnivore. I'm glad I don't have one. 
Parrots: cra!-cra!-cra!-cra! for FORTY minutes. My new least favorite animal in the world. 

Then we have Wednesday, formaldehyde day. Our pony cadaver has dwindled to a single leg dangling from the ceiling, though it took a lot of work to get there. Dissection is the art of finding the really delicate bundle of nerves before you cut it...and then cutting it and moving on. 

time out

Possibly I spent too much time last night studying in compensation for not studying earlier, and got five hours of sleep. So that may explain the feeling sucky all afternoon today. I can force myself through lecture, but the thought of spending hours floundering about as the untrained surgery tech (getting progressively colder in the well-chilled surgery ward) was too much. I went home and slept on and off. When I couldn't sleep anymore, I got up. I've had some lamb thawed out for a couple of days, so I put it in a stew pot with the usual compliment of vegetables, then sauteed the leftovers. There was probably a half pound of lamb there...after I finished off most of it, it occurred to me that my blood iron is probably low again. I tend to crave tomatoes, meat, and liver (in that order) as I become more anemic. I'm not feeling a particular craving for liver, true; but then, I just ate a lot of red meat.  

So it's been a non-starter of a day. I tried to go in to school early, and ended up spacing out for most of the "extra time" I had gained.

But there's sunlight, and I'm doing a lot of watering of plants. I put five little strawberry plants in pots and they're putting out leaves on super-fuzzy stalks. I can't say the same for the ones I ripped out of the garden a few weeks ago. Most exciting are the thin cylinders of leaf coming from my Hawaiian stick. It will be a plumeria, some day, or so the label said. It's always nice when the things I plant manage to stay alive. It's not that I dramatically murder green leafy organisms, they just...pine for water and light.

Return of the Biting Horse

To be honest, Zippo has not actually bit anyone (that I know of). But she started to get a bit tired of me poking around on her face today during the midterm exam of our physical exam skills, and started putting her ears back and gnashing at the air.

The real moment of crisis came when the doctor told me to palpate her mammary glands. 

There was a sudden movement of hindquarters...the tectonic upheaval of a horse readying herself to kick...but I made it out of the way in time. She was peeved. She took this great huge kick she'd been getting ready for and turned it into a tiny little tap on the stall wall behind her. 

"I guess we won't be checking the mammary glands today," the doctor said.

Bad exams

Two exams gone badly, three to go...gosh, I may end up retaking every exam if I keep up like this. Pharmacology was bad, since I knew only half the drugs, and you can't predict their effects if you don't know what part of the nervous system they affect. I think I completely mucked up my essay on how beta receptors work too. It's sad, because I actually LIKE pharmacology. But I said that about neurology too. And anatomy. Apparently my study techniques are way sub-par this semester. I obviously have to stop having dinner when I get home, since that seems to suck two hours away from the evening.

That said, I'm going to go study now.

Horses

For large animal, they send us to the university's teaching facility and we spend a couple of hours every week learning how to love the smell of cows and horses. The logistics of getting there are never fun, since there's not much public transportation in the middle of the day. But it's surprisingly enjoyable to spend time leaning on dusty cow flanks listening to rumen sounds.

As is typical, the hang-ups come not from the animals but from the people in charge of them.

One of the faculty sent us a furious e-mail about how us stupid vet students were tracking mud into their pristine research facility and some very important people had noticed. One of the faculty stationed herself at the door and glared at everyone who came through the door with any footgear on. If they were wearing shoes, "You better have boots to change into!" And if they already had on boots, "You aren't supposed to wear boots in the entrance!" I was a bit irked because they never bothered to tell us before last week, aside from some mythical announcement that no one heard because we would have had to arrive early on the first day, and everyone was still scrambling to find transportation that week. The horses seemed no less annoyed with us, though I think most of them were pretty well sedated. I got to make the acquaintance of Zippo, a mare who adores the doctor in charge of the barn but tries to bite everyone else. My group decided we would skip taking her temperature. I haven't dealt with horses that are serious about biting before. I don't know how to react to an angry horse--although having three students all trying to pet it fails to impress me as a good idea. She must have been at least somewhat sedated, though, because we got out of there with our fingers intact. Oddly enough she seemed to like having her upper lip rubbed. The rest of the time she put her ears back and made startingly fast attempts to get her teeth on whoever stood too near her head.

Joys of vodka

Things to do with vodka:

Make vanilla extract
Make amaretto
Use as a fluidizer for hydrophobic pharmacological drugs
Rescue cats from antifreeze poisoning

I've only done the first two, myself, but according to one of the doctors at the school the bit about cats is true. See, anti-freeze does terrible things to an animal (or small child) that consumes it. It gets into the gears of metabolism and gums them up, by latching onto a particular enzyme that deals with alcohol (which does show up as a by product of a working organism). Puppies like anti-freeze because it tastes sweet, so they show up in emergency rooms not infrequently. For them the antidote works fine. It was developed for people, of course, but you just dose the dog on the same basic parameters.

In cats, however, the antidote doesn't work, at least not nearly so easily. By sextupling the dose, it turns out it works just fine, but it took a few years to figure that out. In the meantime, vets found they could treat cats by dosing them with ethanol--i.e. alcohol--which kept enough alcohol-metabolizing enzymes busy that they didn't get dead-ended by the antifreeze. Bodies are pretty good at getting rid of toxins eventually. The cat would get over the poisoning, albeit with a nasty hangover.

Long live novel uses for liquor.

Really ought-tos

I really ought to study more.
I really ought to get more sleep.
I really ought to get fewer groceries (but...chocolate!)
I really ought to not sign up for an overloaded semester...oh, wait, already did.

It's hard to be enthusiastic in anything other than short bursts right now. I like when school is neat, clean, limited to lecture halls and labs with pristine microscopes. But this semester I'm dissecting cows and horses, and must venture out every week to work with live ones in a cold barn. I'm dreading the commute more than anything. And some part of my brain decided it would be good experience for me to sign up for shifts in the large animal barn and a job in the small animal surgery. Which, since they are considerate of students having lecture during the day, has all the shifts going from 6:30 pm to 8 am the next morning. Granted, it's on call, but then that just means getting called in at 4 am, the morning of a school day. And buses don't run at that time. Was I insane? *nodding head vigorously*

But all this griping is done on the assumption that I'm temporarily ruffled and, once I start in on all of the above, its sheer fascinatingness will win me over.

For now, though, hand me the chocolate.

Back to school

But first, a diverting experience with stomach flu! Diverting thanks to online episodes of television I would otherwise never watch. Not to mention real-life experience with gastrointestinal nervous system. It's nice to go over that sort of thing in lecture the same day it happens to you. And everyone else in the country, apparently. Turns out there's been a lot of stomach pain on both coasts, and in the middle. No pun intended.

The nifty thing this semester is that there's light when we get out of class at 4:30 now, even if it's currently gray. Gray sky, gray smokestacks, and massive heaps of snow. Makes being inside all the time seem okay. Classes aren't quite so riveting as last semester, though. The first semester of vet school they gave us the best professors, and we were learning anatomy and physiology finally at the level of detail that I suspected might exist but rarely found in undergrad. Plus we had histology, and how cool is that?

The un-nifty thing is a weekly trip to the local cow&horse facility. That would be okay, the part that is sad is that they aren't offering any help at all as far as transportation goes. Whee, carpooling. (Not much enthusiasm here, although that might have something to do with the hour long lecture on "horses come in different colors!")