The other first day of 4th year

My first rotation was good and bad--it consisted of half days in parasitology and clin path. Good, because I needed the other half of those days to do follow up care on my dog, garden, and sleep. Bad because clin path with just more of the same, a lot of sitting in lecture trying not to fall asleep and learning nothing new.

My first real rotation, therefore, was surgery. Which was amazing, and awesome, and I loved it. The first three days were harrowing, since it wasn't just a new rotation, it was the first time I'd been in a clinic in the role of an almost-vet. My first spay took five hours, which is really not something to boast about. On the other hand, it was a fat, adult rottie who started some insidious hemorrhaging and required multiple dives into her abdomen to find the blood vessel in question. Still, I felt way less than smart. In comparison, my three hour spay this week was a breeze.

First day of Fourth year!

And I get to goof off until noon! Oh, parasitology didactic, how I love thee...

The powers that be were benevolent and wise and gave us a week off before rotations start. I used mine to do surgery on my dog! He's a farm dog and I can't bring him into town, to keep an eye on him, so hurrah for multiple medical professionals in the family who can help take care of him.

Now, we're not supposed to talk about/photograph/otherwise break client confidentiality on cases from school. However, this is my dog, on my own time, which means I can post as many photos of his splenic mass as I desire. Mwahahaha!

My apologies to the squeamish

Isn't it purty? It was huge, about nine inches across and dangling off the very far end of his spleen. I helped the vet tie off the manymany blood vessels and we just took out the entire spleen. It turned into a somewhat less than sterile field because the incision had to be extended so far we ended up beyond the prepped area, but I've heard "Exposure is everything." And it was really fast. Except the last bit where I closed the subcuticular layer. It was not perhaps the neatest suturing I've done, and I've gotten to look at it every day and go "Man, I wish I had fixed the tension in that one spot better..." But Danny--that's the dog--is doing fine. The first couple of days he was nice and quiet and just lay in the kitchen and waited for his jars of baby food. Now he's feeling better. He's gaining back weight. Yay! It'll still be about a week before there's any strength to his abdominal wall, but we've gotten through the first few days!

Wintergreen

One very windswept looking wintergreen plant arrived for me today. It has kept me company while I study for equine medicine tomorrow. I spent rather longer out in the garden than I planned (as usual...but the potatoes MUST be planted!), so now I stay up extra late to make it through all the respiratory, gastrointestinal, and nutritional quirks of horses.

This whole section is getting shortchanged on study time. Large animal surgery took four whole days to study for (more would have been nice), and this section just gets about half a day, since I kept getting distracted by things like exercise, making dinner, visiting friends who were temporarily in the hospital-- you know, luxuries. Oh, and my dog has a huge abdominal mass. If I can figure out the timing, he'll go to surgery this week and I'll get to watch, but only if it fits in around the radiology and anesthesiology finals.

Horskies

It snowed, but was otherwise a fantastic day of walking past hundreds of horses. I know only a little about horses, but my mom knows tons, so I talked her into coming and imparting some of her knowledge to me. For instance, conformation. I can judge a beef cow pretty competently, same for a sheep, and I can get by when it comes to dairy cows and chickens. But horses, not so much. For one thing, I get distracted by how high on their heads their eyes are (cows' eyes are lower down). It's an odd thing to trip up on, but there you go. And I still get confused by their legs, despite the fact I spent an entire semester dissecting a pony cadaver. As soon as I try to think about the fact their front knees are equivalent to our wrist joint, I just lose it and can't even figure out the proportions.

So it was helpful to have someone along who was willing to spend two hours pointing out the differences between haflingers and quarterhorses, Belgians and Andalusians, pacers and standardbreds, and then quiz me on them. There were a few horses with really lousy conformation too (or so I was told), so I was gradually able to start piecing things together. I have apparently been mistaken for years about what "dish-faced" actually means. I think I interpreted it as being concave between the eyes, sort of "a la bovine", when actually it's the nose below that. I also learned that you aren't supposed to pet stallions on the nose/upper lip area, even though they twitch their lips and give every appearance of enjoying it, since that can give them bad habits that lead to biting. And I finally can make sense of an anecdote my mom likes about one of her horses that she described as having "little boxes" on his legs. I couldn't tell you which horses have "good" boxy joints, but I could at least tell there was a difference between the two morgans she was using as the examples.

Blue Coat Ceremony

We had our version of eighth-grade graduation for school today, where they told us all the wonderfully stressful things that will happen to us in our final year and how we are going to be lucky to get three hours of sleep per night. And any food other than take-out pizza. Thanks, all, that was very inspiring...

So I'm feeling the need to study even more than usual. So much need, I'm actually studying! (Until I started writing this blog post...) Except my lecture notes have been making me fall asleep. I took a break and set up pizza (good pizza, not silly take-out pizza) and bread dough. My favorite bread, too, a delectable oats&honey loaf. I took a break from making it because I was having trouble NOT eating it, and I was worried about gaining weight. As I have now gained weight anyway, even without tasty bread, there seems no point in making anything less than delectable. At least this way I stand of a chance of turning down the many less appealing foods that might tempt me, since they are just SO obviously inferior.

As for next year, though...eeeh. I will have to talk with my GI doctor, but I suspect if I try to do the no-sleep, lousy-food, high-stress routine they tell us we are in for, I will relapse and be miserable. I already feel like I'm balanced way too precariously on the edge of prepared/not prepared--like I am going to have to put more effort into relearning things because I only half-learned them the first time. It doesn't help that the last exam for large animal really, really underscored the

So it will be dependent on my ability to generate a sense of zen and peacefulness despite all the craziness, ultimately. No pressure.

I take comfort in the conversation I had with one of our professors, who said, "4th year doesn't have to be as stressful as people find it..." I'm not sure exactly how one goes about making it non-stressful, but the fact the bf is spending the summer off on his own special learning experience will definitely free up my time for rotations. I really slacked off on learning russian this last year, though, so it's going to be a tough time not talking with him--as part of his program, he is supposed to keep communication in any other languages to a minimum. I can still send him pictures, he can still write me letters (if they're in russian).

But in the meantime, I must figure out this zen thing. Hmmm, how to be zen while studying three years worth of material on top of daily lectures and clinics...

More time, please

Vet school really has done a number on my conception of myself as a good student. Now that we have one month left of lectures before we start clinics, it seems a little late to make any significant changes, but I still get very regretful on the nights before exams that I don't have a couple more days to show that I can study, I can be a good student, I just ran out of time. Unfortunately this trend has been going on for two years now, so the best I can do is pass the exams. Even if I study my butt off, at this point there's so much background information I'm trying to make up for that I realistically can't ace an exam. (I did try--I started studying three weeks ahead and attended all the lectures in a state of awakeness and so forth. I got 52 percent. On the other hand, the class average was 68 percent, and I had company down on my end of the curve, so I figure that particular exam was designed solely to crush our spirits.)

Being in a class full of overachievers doesn't help. ALL of them complain that they have not studied enough for the next exam. They then quiz each other on things that I am lucky if I remember from lecture, and which I haven't gotten around to reviewing yet. Really annoying when this happens five minutes before the exam.

Then there's meds. They screw with my concentration and my sleep schedule in maddeningly unpredictable ways. One day I'm fine with five hours of sleep, and the next day--although I may stay awake--I won't be able to recall a single thing from lecture aside from a vague sense that horses' joints came into it somewhere.

But part of it is really that I just don't spend enough time studying (unpredictable sleep schedule doesn't help, I will concede that much). Studying is like writing, I find--it won't get done if you don't sit down, and it's surprisingly hard sometimes. So It's especially frustrating when technology sabotages an hour of writing up notes by crashing the moment you try to save them. >.< Aargh. I already had one panic attack today, I refuse to have another one, plus my boyfriend told me he'll force me to e-mail the professor about not taking the exam tomorrow if I do. And even with a medical excuse, I don't see that going over well. Radiology exams involve lots of actual radiographs, which I suspect they don't want to put up and take down more than once.

At least I have the comfort that the act of creating questions was the point of the write-up. It would have been nice to go back and read through them (again, aargh), but realistically I would have run out of time anyway. So it's on to the next batch of write-ups, and this time remembering to save--if only as proof that yes, I studied!