LambCalfDolphin

The other first day of 4th year

2011-06-19T11:40:00.000-07:00

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!

2011-05-16T08:30:00.001-07:00

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!

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

2011-05-04T21:47:00.001-07:00

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

2011-04-17T11:42:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-10T20:19:00.000-07:00

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 my fiance 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, my fiance 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

2011-04-04T21:40:00.000-07:00

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!

The eyes would have it

2010-12-20T20:17:00.000-08:00

Except I was wiped out by the food animal exam and then grocery shopping turned into less of an outing and more of an endurance test than I had expected. Instead of going to the Great Big Grocery Store of Limitless Choices, I ended up at the local pricey-elitist food store instead. I put up with it because 1) they have some of the obscure food items I am now looking for, and 2) it's all of a quarter mile away. Which when the snow arrives is pretty handy. But it's still pricey. And I had been looking forward to seeing what Limitless Choices might have had. They might have had kefir! They might have had sugar-free-but-not-plain kefir! I really truly needed to go grocery shopping, though, because I have begun to run out food I can eat.

Background: my last little run-in with Crohn's made me realize I haven't been exploring all the options for treatment. If the medicine was working, I would be getting better, not going to the hospital the night before finals week. I rather foolishly assumed that my doctors knew what they were talking about when they said diet doesn't affect it. I now realize that this is a bit of a blind spot for Medicine. For some unfathomable reason, Medicine doesn't like the idea of diet having anything to do with health, except in a general "eat your vegetables" sort of way. I was told to go onto a low residue diet like a good little patient, whereupon I said, "but that's like what my boyfriend eats."

(My boyfriend, by choice, eats white bread, pasta with no sauce, and blueberry yogurt. Fortunately he does like quality beef, lamb, and zucchini brownies, so we still get along.)

The desperate search for dietary advice (is oatmeal okay? Blueberries? Ice cream?) led me over into the realm of macrobiotic diets (thank you, Google Books!). And while a little more research reveals a certain delusional quality that attends alternative diets (if you're supposed to eat seasonally and locally, and you happen to live in the middle of a continental landmass, explain to me again how Japanese seaweed is local?), there was also a hint of reason. Goodness knows refined sugar isn't natural in the quantities I enjoy it. It took me all of two days on liquid diet to get over the initial brooding about a life without cookies, and all of half a day on solid foods for me to discover a way to make cookies entirely with honey (it's not refined sucrose! Close enough!).

I got into a huff at my GI because she thought I was going to go holistic and quit my medications on her, just because I asked if she knew any nutritionists.
So, goals:
1. Find a dietitian who can tell me whether I'm allowed to eat oatmeal.
2. Find studies showing the effect of diet on Crohn's disease.
3. If there are no studies...well, I may have to reconsider my stance on not wanting to do research. I'm a vet student, not a med student, which decreases my ability to say "Time for a human study!" But there's so many people about my age with Crohn's, I can't believe there's NOT a way to gather some scientifically useful information about how diet affects it. New facebook group, anyone?
4. Cut refined sugar from my own diet, to start with.

Other possible foods to get the axe: dairy, wheat, possibly specific carbohydrates (but that's starting to get pretty extreme, when you cut rice--and chocolate!). I get the sense there's a true correlation between Crohn's and sugar, though. Funnily enough, it's one of the macrobiotic books claims that sugar acidifies the intestines that tipped the balance for me. I don't buy the pseudoscience, but there's sometimes deeper truths that Medicine hasn't gotten around to looking at because it *ahem* has its head up its bum.

The funny thing is that I had a professor last year whose ongoing research is the connection between Johne's and Crohn's. I'm trying to figure out a good way to ask him about his research. It just seems awkward to send him a random e-mail, though, saying, "So, after you gave that lecture about mycobacterium last year, it occurred to me I ought to check out my disturbingly recognizable symptoms, and heeey, guess what disease I am now becoming an expert in?"

Oh, but hey, I'm supposed to be taking a massive scary exam in ophthalmology tomorrow. My perspective is so skewed these days...even as I'm finding more and more compelling reasons to learn medicine really well, the relative value of grades becomes very distant and abstract. I shall study a bit, though, and hopefully I'll finish out the semester with passing grades even with all the road bumps along the way.

4th year what?

2010-10-25T09:55:00.000-07:00

We had a 4th year planning meeting today to learn about all the wonderful intimidating aspects of setting up our 4th years rotations and externships. I think for most of us--definitely for me--there was an element of: "Wait, what? Shoot, I have to get on this! I'm not ready!" On the one hand, I want to excel! I want to be enthusiastic and personable and competent on every rotation I do (and I want to do them all). On the other hand, I know I'm going to be tired and frazzled and will want to just go home as soon as I can, so I worry that I'm going to completely FAIL to be enthusiastic and competent (and as for being personable, well, one can only do so much while trying to remember the medicine, the science, the animal-handling, and how that one person is a pain to work with but DON'T let them know that).

Oh, and I have an exam tomorrow. I did not realize this until this morning. Upon reflection, I probably would have spent a lot less time driving around doing errands this weekend had I known. And more time studying the prevention of mastitis in dairy cows.

Too Hot

2010-08-03T13:22:00.000-07:00

I need to get up a lot earlier if it's going to stay in the high 80's + humidity. Nine AM was obviously not early enough to be outside doing things. Granted, I think the mosquitos would have been happy to eat me at whatever hour I went outside, but at least I wouldn't have felt like I was wading through liquid warmth to boot. I have achieved one main thing today, and that was moving the roosters. They have been eating the tomatoes as the tomatoes got ripe, and when they chowed down on a golden jubilee I had had my eye on for three days, that was it. (They took a few bites out of every single other tomato that was within a day of ripening for good measure.)

Roosters are easy to catch if it is at night and you have a flashlight to shine in their eyes. They stare at the flashlight and, though suspicious that you might be doing something out of their sight, they don't panic until you have already caught them. Then they shriek bloody murder. We collected all 7 from their various roosts in the barn and sheds. They had to hang out in a dog crate all night, and of course the dogs had a splendid time running over to look in at the birdies, running away when we yelled "No chickens!" and back again as soon as the echo of our voices had died down and, to a dog's brain, had no more authority.

I drove the crate out to the other farm, and released the roosters onto the lawn. Only one of them bothered to check out the corn and water I'd put out for them. All the other roosters were interested only in getting as far away from each other as possible. Hopefully they'll make a couple of circuits and either find the water I put out or, ideally, figure out where the cows' waterers are and drink out of those.

Dog adoptions

2010-07-31T10:29:00.000-07:00

This has been a summer remarkably free of veterinary medicine. I believe I had planned to be more enthused about inflicting my presence on local veterinarians, but between driving home every other day, gardening, and the trying to write on a daily basis, I've been remarkably busy. It takes about three hours of procrastination for me to get around to one hour of writing. This is an improvement over it taking three days to achieve the same level of frantic "must-write-NOW". At some point, I may achieve two hours of writing at a time. And that will be about the time school starts, at which point busyness truly descends with a vengeance.

In the meantime--I inadvertently talked my fiance into getting a greyhound. Not YET, but presumably we'll be picking a dog-friendly apartment for next year. I think it's Pye's fault. Pye is one of my dogs, very old but only recently starting to act like it (something about megaesophagus and retching all the time...). We adopted him when I was in middle school. He wasn't a mellow dog then, but the intervening years really reduced the running off/playbiting/barking all night. He now has just about enough energy to wander up and gaze imploringly at you. My fiance, who has never had dogs or cats, is a complete sucker for this sort of canine manipulation. And I may have mentioned, one time when I was trying to explain greyhound dispositions (from what I've seen--I admit I don't have a ton of experience with them), that they do this same sort of imploring gaze.

I'm hoping that adopting a greyhound goes smoother than adopting Pye went. I remember the local Humane Society, which I previously had considered a Good and Intelligent institution, really didn't want to let us adopt a dog from them. The problem? We live on a farm. The dog would be on a farm. The dog would be outside on the farm. Apparently, it is anathema to the humane society's mission to let any dog spend nights outside the warmth and protection of a house. If the dog came from a farm? Well, then it would be okay--unless the dog had become an indoor dog since its days on a farm. All dogs at the humane society are housed indoors. Ergo, all dogs from the humane society are indoor dogs. I think they finally let us have Pye because he had already come through the humane society twice (both times because he had way too much energy for living in a house), and they were getting desperate.

Talking with other people from farms (often vet students), this is pretty common. It doesn't matter how qualified the potential owner might be, the humane society would rather euthanize dogs than adopt them out to farms. Do they think the dogs are going to be unhappy on the farm? Do they envision horrible accidents involving combines? Do they think all outdoor dogs are abused dogs?

That said, greyhounds would not make good farm dogs. From what I know, they are capable of a little too much speed with not enough discretion for wire fences.

Mad Cooking Skillz

2010-05-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

I has 'em.

Granted, the last three things I made didn't really turn out, as such. But this one is awesome, I promise! And healthy, which is a huge step out of the ordinary for me. It's just wrong, though, that Whole Foods has cheaper orzo and kalamata olives than the local generic grocery store. On one level it makes sense: Orzo = specialty item, Whole Foods = specialty store, therefore Whole Foods = better orzo selection. But the idea of anything being cheaper there is an alien concept.

I needed the orzo to make salad for the celebratory end-o-finals potluck my class is holding. We have a competition for pathology/parasitology themed foods, and orzo...I mean, have you seen it? It looks almost exactly like little lucilia bots, without the hint of ridges. I wanted kalamata olives to simulate cuterebra, although really I just wanted kalamata olives because they are tasty. And then I added so much spinach and tomato that it doesn't really look frighteningly parasitic at all. But my main goal is to bring something that people will eat, which never seems to happen when I bring cookies. Even the cross-section-of-the-pons cookies I brought last year completely failed to disappear, and they were delicious in addition to being neuroanatomically correct. Well, correct-ish. It's hard to prevent refrigerator cookies from getting a little lopsided. Those would have been neat to do this year--I could have added red hots and called it nigropallidal encephalomalacia.

Poisonous plants

2010-05-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

Continuing my toxicology studying...(this is going to be a long one)

Most poisonous plants do not taste good. If you don't force the animals to eat them, they probably won't. (For a given definition of "force"...leaving a cat in the room with a lily may qualify as forcing the poor feline to chew on the plant).
Other definitions of "force":
-overgrazing
-underfeeding
-lack of forage (i.e. drought) or accumulation of toxins (ex. corn accumulates nitrates)
-misidentification

If the hay contains toxic weeds, stop feeding it. This may fix all the problems.

Berries are bad.

Common names are, well, common. Totally different plants may share the name.

Now, by system:

Cardiovascular
Cyanide and cardiac glycosides are the major toxins here. Oleander, Japanese Yew, and foxglove are potent, as are seemingly innocuous fruit trees like apple, apricot, and choke-cherry (which sounds totally innocuous, doesn't it?).
Kalanchoe has cardiac glycoside-ish substances, and it's sold as houseplant where it doesn't grow wild. But then, everything toxic seems to be sold as a houseplant. Like lily of the valley. And monkshood. And water hemlock.

Choke cherry (prunus virginiana)
delphinium/larkspur
foxglove (digitalis)
Japanese yew (taxus) has red berries with poisonous seeds. On the other hand, they've made a nice chemo drug with it now.
Kalanchoe causes vomiting, diarrhea, in addition to the CV signs. No struggling before death, cyanotic membranes, and petechial hemorrhages in the GI tract.
Lily of the valley (convallaria majalis) works through cardiac glycosides.
Monkshood (aconitum) grows in meadows and mountains.
Oleander (Nerium oleander) is very common in California. Do NOT toast marshmallows on sticks from oleander bushes.
Summer pheasant's eye (Adonis aestivalis) is similar to oleander and foxglove, horses and sheep are the usual victims.
Water hemlock (Cicuta maculata) is even more poisonous than poison hemlock, although it becomes deceptively palatable (to herbivores, presumably) after being sprayed with herbicide.

Blood
Bracken fern takes weeks to start causing bone marrow depression in cattle. Horses are done for by thiaminase and get neurologic signs.
Onions have n-propyl disulfides, which oxidize hemoglobin and cause weakness, depression, pale or icteric mucous membranes. Also GI distrubances, rapid pulse and respiration, and, of course, Heinz-body hemolytic anemia.
Red maple contains gallic acid in the wilted leaves, which kills horses by hemolytic anemia.
Sweet clover (melilotus), a question I got wrong on the neuropath exam, are only poisonous when dried improperly and make dicoumarol. Sheep are more resistant than cattle.

GI
Solanaceae: everyone's favorite little known fact is that tomatoes are related to nightshade! (a guy once tried to impress me with his knowledge of this fact, which would probably have gone over better had he not so obviously been clueless about anything and everything else botanical)
Other fun clinical signs: CNS depression, cardiovascular collapse, hallucinations (a specialty of Jimsonweed, aka datura).
Mountain laurel is related to azalea and rhododendrons, and its toxins can get into meat and honey.
Mayapple (sometimes called mandrake, though it's not the same plant as that mandrake). Vomiting, lethargy are the big clinical signs, but it can be treated with copious fluid therapy. Mayapple doesn't make much of a house plant, but it's sold as a lovely native plant for people doing shade gardening.
Sneezeweed is a direct GI irritant, seen in sheep in the west (where it's probably always overgrazed and droughty).
Tobacco.
Brunfelsia, known as Yesterday Today and Tomorrow, can cause seizures and resemble strychnine. Takes a long time for recovery.

Liver and skin
It turns out plant-filled diets contain phylloerythrin, which is a photosensitive compound that does really nasty things when it deposits in the skin and get exposed to sunlight. Cracking and sloughing sorts of things. Plants like St. Johnswort and tansy ragwort cause liver disease, and then photosensitization (pyrrolizidine alkaloids). Plants like alsike clover just cause photosensitization (mainly horses). Then there's cycad palm, which is just incredibly toxic. On the other hand, in more northern states where it never flowers, you don't have to worry about its seeds, which are the most toxic part.

Nervous system
Hemp grows wild and is occasionally eaten in complete innocence by pigs that are bedded on it. More often it is the basis of entertaining stories about teasing out the truth from people who bring their dogs in after the dog ate someone's stash...Expect nervousness, irritation, CNS depression, and coma. In the dog.
Horsetail shows up in forage. It's related to bracken fern, has the same thiaminase enzyme. Cows that eat it become hyperexciteable, stagger, tremble, lose weight and drop milk production.
White snakeroot also likes wetland areas. Its toxin is tremetol, which causes choke, from partial throat paralysis, and trembling in horses.
Yellow star thistle causes what is sometimes called "chewing disease". Horses develop a very focal lesion at the nigropallidal...um...spot.

Musculoskeletal
Black walnut shavings are used for bedding, and then cause laminitis, severe edema, and ultimately severe GI signs in horses.
Hoary alyssum creates similar problems when it shows up being fed in hay.

Well, that was a brief section.

Renal
Oxalates!
Also alkaloids.
Autumn crocus, honestly, affects the GI more, but colchicine alkaloids in the bulb still do irreversible kidney damage.
Death camas show up most in the western states--they're occasionally mistaken for onions, it seems.
Philodendron, peace lily, dieffenbachia (dumbcane) are all oxalate containing houseplants. Dumbcane is especially interesting--its cells eject calcium oxalate when it is chewed, which makes the throat swell up (rendering the chewer dumb).
Easter lily is the culprit of the cat-in-a-locked-room mystery (at least back before anyone realized that lilies were quite that toxic to cats--or that cats would eat something that was so completely deadly).
Greasewood and halogeton (Jack-in-the-pulpit, another native shade plant) contain oxalates that really screw up rumens and cause other problems for grazing animals.

Reproduction
Goats that eat avocado plants get mastitis.
Locoweed interferes with estrus cycle.
Lupine--which is actually grown as forage for cattle-- causes crooked calf syndrome if the cow eats it between days 40-70 of gestation. The calf may be born with cleft palate or more severe signs.
False hellebore, also known as corn lily, causes "cyclops lambs".
Poison hemlock, which is related to carrots of all things, is most famous for being used to kill Socrates (or was it actually water hemlock?)
Ponderosa pine can cause abortions.
White snakeroot is secreted in milk--that's the one that killed Lincoln's mother.
Then there's castor bean, a lovely toxic looking ornamental that contains ricin, one of the most toxic substances known to man.

Surgery: Anatomy

2010-04-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

Today for surgery class (i.e. sit in lecture hearing the basics once, so that next year we cannot say things like, "I've never heard of ___, how do you expect me to know about it?") we're covering anatomy. So far: anatomy is important. Anatomy has important implications for suture. Last week we went over suture, so in theory this all makes perfect sense, at any rate makes more sense than enzymology in clin path. In all fairness, the clin path professors do a terrific job, and I'm sure by the time we have an exam enzymology will make more sense than whatever the next topic is going to be.

Anatomy has been occupying me outside of lecture recently. An artist friend of mine discovered anatomy last year by way of a life drawing class. All of a sudden her sketches of people included such innovative things as triceps. (This year I'm going to be taking the same class, actually, although for different reasons--my drawing skills need help. I know where the muscles are, I'm just lousy at delineating them.) She would like to now spread the joy of knowledge, so we're working on an anatomy workshop for fantasy artists. It will have skulls. If I could, I would bring in a horse leg with intact suspensory apparatus, but that's probably a bit beyond the scope of a one-hour talk that is starting out with "This is a skeleton..."

Pharm studying...

2010-03-23T14:54:00.001-07:00

I. need. a. nap. I woke up at 5 am this morning, just like I did back in February on the untapered dose of prednisone. Alas, it was not accompanied by the irrepressible urge to study. It could have been; I caught an early bus to school, but I got sidetracked by the lake and took mostly blurry photos of geese for a while. If I'm going to make a habit of this, I really ought to start carrying my nice camera. It's not pocket sized, and it has the drawbacks of middle-range digital (grainy ISO, anyone?). But I can force it to do things like take photos in poor light that are not irretrievably blurry (or grainy), sometimes within seconds of pressing the button.

At any rate, I still have studying for the exam tomorrow to do, but my eyes are so tired it's distracting. So...perhaps a little nap...

path studying

2010-03-21T16:12:00.000-07:00

I think the reason systemic pathology is so hard is because it completely fails to be cumulative. I'm not talking about the exams. The exams are the worst sort of cumulative, because they're two to three hundred different things to know. The class itself, though has no underlying direction. With clinical pathology, you have to know lecture 1 before lecture 2 will make sense, and the same goes for labs. It's easier to keep track of what you know and don't know. With systemic path, however, they really do just keep throwing names of diseases at us. With reproductive and dermatology it's especially bad, because although the diseases are different, all the symptoms seem to be pretty much the same. There's swelling. There's erosions. There may be keratin! And then you differentiate based on...well, based on whether the notes match up word for word with the picture's caption.

Studying after the first ten hours is just frustrating, when you're STILL just scrolling through disease (it's not even that they're diseases, they're specific symptoms which may or may not have a known disease attached).

But for a bit of a change, my kitchen sink clogged up! I used up the last of the drain-o, it's still not draining right, and my entire apartment now smells like rotting eggs. I think it may be time to take my notes to the gym and enjoy the ellipticals for a while.

Hymenolepsis

2010-03-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

I have seen the Midgard Serpent and it is a tapeworm.

No, really.

In lab today, we had really beautiful examples of rat tapeworms (hymenolepsis diminuta). The professor put about an inch length on a slide for us to look at, and the first impression on looking through the slide is "Holy heck, it's MOVING!" Which I may have mentioned in the past as a special feature of parasitology lab. It was all the more impressive because through the eyepieces, what was a thin white thread has become a vast field of undulating, scale-like segments. Marvelous to behold, and squirm-inducing.

The odd thing about tapeworms, though, is that as far as parasites go they're pretty innocuous. They are mightily impressive, but they like to just hang out in the lumen of the gut and grow. Granted, they grow pretty impressively. And a couple of really big ones could potentially cause some obstruction. But it's nothing like the damage liver flukes or roundworms do.

Skype is my mood-altering drug

2010-03-18T16:10:00.001-07:00

It's odd how much my mood changes based on number of days between hearing from my boyfriend. Wednesdays, usually 4-5 days out, are generally pretty dreadful until I hear from him, and if I don't get any word at all, I pretty much write the day off as a loss. I still try to get things done, but I fail to get any sense of accomplishment. So yesterday was unpleasant. I got through ten pages of pathology and picked out a case for homework in pharmacology, and reviewed parasites...but emotionally it didn't make a dent. (well, okay, maybe a little dent. A morose sense of not having fallen behind quite so much as is possible)

Today hasn't been nearly so productive (yet), but hey, we skyped for two hours! The world is a good place again! I can even look forward to another twenty pages of path and maybe making a chart for pharmacology too. Yay motivation!

I still haven't figured out if having my significant other away for the semester has been wonderful enough for my study habits to make up for all the attendant stress. It was probably as well he didn't have to be around for the manic-depressive month, when I was only sleeping five hours a day and studying frenetically the rest of the time. I got a lot done with those extra three hours. Now I actually have to sleep, which is much less helpful in terms of waking up in any sort of shape to study at 5 am. But I'll have another shot at it tomorrow. (Waking up later means I just fritter away the time before class instead of getting into a good study groove)

Prions

2010-03-11T19:31:00.000-08:00

The wet lab today was excellent, not least because I successfully removed a cow's spinal cord on the first go. With a grapefruit spoon. The sheep's spinal cord was trickier, and I'm afraid I shaved off half the section I was supposed to be retrieving, but hey, I found the tonsils! And the retropharyngeal lymph nodes too. An entire year of anatomy and it took a fresh sheep head to make me realize where the darn things are located. It becomes much more relevant when you are trying to obtain samples for very specific histologic testing. In anatomy, it was just, "tell the difference between fifteen different pinkish squishy bits of tissue."

I don't think any of the heads we were working with were scrapie-positive (though with sheep, you never know), but the demo head did come from a deer with CWD symptoms. I have been in the same room with prions...

If only prions weren't so potentially super-super-scary, they would be an awesome thing to study. However, as it is, they seem a little too subtle for working with. In some ways, they are in the same category with tuberculosis and smallpox; the deadly diseases that are so subtle that they've already escaped control again (granted, smallpox has been declared eliminated. But the book Demon in the Freezer makes a pretty convincing case that it would be too easy for it to make a reappearance).

I think this is what makes parasitology so appealing on one level: all you have to do is look, and if the worms are there you'll see them. And you can even remove them by hand if all else fails (sometimes). They make us squirm, but it is productive squirming! Prions, on the other hand, are virtually undetectable and insidious. They can't be killed, they can't be stopped, all you can do is avoid them and try to make sure they don't spread. Which is why CWD is a scary thing, for all that its impact hasn't really been seen yet. Deer across the country are seeding the ground with prions, and no one knows what's going to happen. But the impact, if any, is so glacially slow in becoming apparent that very little action is being taken.

Brr. Yeah, it was an excellent wet lab, but not the sort of stuff that makes you sleep soundly at night.

Snow Frog!

2010-03-08T06:03:00.000-08:00

What does this have to do with studying/school/anything?

...

But it was really fun!

Bad knee unregarded, I needed exercise yesterday, so I took the dogs for a walk through the woods. And then there was this wonderful field of snow, and the snow was at that soft crunchy, almost granular stage, where it's really easy to dig into but also compacts into solid lumps very well.

And now it will melt, because we're going through a warm period. But hey, it had one good afternoon watching the sunset across fields of cows, so 'sgood.

Schistosomes are my favorite...

2010-03-06T21:08:00.001-08:00

Parasitology lab scores high, high marks for featuring microscopic things that WRIGGLE! We spend so much time looking at blood smears and tissue samples and path specimens (scenterific is the word that comes to mind every Monday morning as I walk in and get a good lungful) that things that move are unique and wonderful. Both squirmy and squirm-inducing. Last time we had live microfilaria in hepatocrit tubes (doin' the dirofilaria dance) and on blood smears.

This week was flukes and other wonderful critters that camp out in the liver (and lungs). I was amazed at the similarity of paragonimus lung flukes to moldy pumpkin seeds: they have the exact same ellipsoid shape and off-putting shade of greenish brown. And Fasciola liver flukes are absolutely lovely, they look like those little leaves that accompany the flowers on linden trees. But with intestines.

Best of all were the schistosomes. These are the wormy things behind swimmer's itch, though that's just in people. In dogs they penetrate the skin and go to the liver. They then eventually work their way to the mesenteric veins. where the males and females hook up for a lifelong spooning session. One of our lecturers very kindly provided live specimens in mouse mesentery, so we were able to see the adults in all their, erm, romantic entanglement. Every egg has a little spike on it that helps it move into the lumen of the bowel (and everywhere else). They're pretty immunogenic, so infected animals end up with lots and lots of granulomas wherever the eggs randomly lodge themselves.

We did tissue squash preps with a thoroughly granulomatous liver. My lab partner isn't a great fan of pathology once it's visible with the naked eye, so I had the privilege of setting up the slide. Large chunks of liver with numerous oval eggs: Success! We were advised to keep watching. Sure enough, after a decent amount of time sitting on a warm microscope, a few of the eggs showed signs of life--little larvae starting to squirm around inside. I was fascinated and would have happily waited for them to hatch, but again, my lab partner wanted to finish with the other slides assigned for the day, so I regretfully put the babies aside. When I came back to the slide, all I could find were the immature eggs and empty egg casings--the larvae had hatched and disappeared.

I was a bit disappointed, and scrolled around a bit more in search of a decently mature egg that might be ready to hatch. Then something shot by in the field of view. Rather like being passed by a car doing 80 on the interstate. I hurried after it as best I could (alas, I did not have enough practice with etch-a-sketches for truly proficient microscope driving). More by accident than anything, it darted back into view again--a tiny, bouncing baby schistosome miracidium. It was very cute, in a flubber sort of way. NOT something I want swimming around my internal organs, mind you. It spun around as a blob, then stretched itself out and darted away again. You could tell around the lab who had gotten to the miracidium stage of their squash mount, because it's hard NOT to exclaim when of of these things swims into your field of view and waves.

Dairy cows

2010-03-04T18:34:00.001-08:00

I went and hung out with vet students this evening. Hoard's Dairyman, which is THE magazine of the dairy world, has an annual judging contest where you look at sets of cows and rank them. So we were sitting around a room staring at glossy magazine pages of Holsteins and Jerseys and Brown Swiss, occasionally saying things like, "I really like A's udder in the front, but D has better teats."

All my cow judging experience is with beef, so I don't know that I was picking them out on quite the right criteria. But anytime I get free pizza and chocolate sounds like a good time to me!

Now, however, I have the prospect of studying looming ahead of me...It will be hard to kick myself into gear for it tonight, because we have no exams for a couple of weeks, so there's no sense of priority. On the other hand, I wasted all my time last night discovering that there are very few good wedding dresses out there that that can double as belly dance outfits. (A belly dancer friend who got married had a beautiful, very structured dress that looked great but did not move well at all.) Not a very fruitful search. And since there will be a lot of time before this question of wedding dresses is even relevant, I imagine my time is much better spent learning about infectious disease.

*attempting to muster enthusiasm*

All righty. Path notes, I shall overcome!

2010-02-26T09:17:00.001-08:00

Okay, I can understand failing a path exam, but parasitology? Oo, that stings. One of the classes that I really actually like and try to do well in. It really smarts, too, that my lab partner probably did perfectly fine, despite the fact she avows her distaste for all things gross and routinely leaves lab an hour before me.

On the other hand, for once I didn't fail path, so does that mean it all balances out?

EDIT:

Going back and looking at the score, I thought to myself, "Huh, that number doesn't look that low..." Upon reworking the math, I found out that I did not in fact fail the parasitology exam. I still didn't do stellar on it, but apparently my ability to answer questions about parasites is at least a little bit better than my ability to divide numbers in my head.

adjusting

2010-02-11T04:06:00.000-08:00

One exam down, four to go, and then the cycle can repeat! After living in terror of the pharm exam for about 36 hours, it turned out that taking it made me the most emotionally stable I'd been all day. It's been really hard getting through days recently, between the prednisone preventing me from sleeping more than 5 hours a day and missing my fiance to a scary degree.

We're still working out how to communicate long-distance, so I never know if I'll hear from him on a given day. My life, after all, is very predictable (aside from the mood swings) and full of opportunities to check e-mail. He, on the other hand, is trying to learn to fit into an entirely new culture with a difficult language, and it's a complete guess when he will have access to the internet (technically he has it at his apartment, but whether he has time to use it is an entirely different matter). I think for me the harder part is knowing that he's going through culture shock and that the only thing I can do is wait. It's not something I can share or ameliorate (which my parents had to remind me; see, this is the problem with the mood swings, is that I feel like I've lost all rationality on top of everything else).

School at least gives me lots of opportunities to stay busy. It's hard to be too miserable when you're learning about the life cycle of lung worms! On that note, off I go to study a bit before class.

Don't eat frozen iguanas

2010-02-09T06:09:00.000-08:00

Florida is having a cold snap, and apparently there's been a rash of dogs showing up at vet clinics with paralysis. After several weeks of this, vets are starting to think it's because of the iguanas. See, iguanas don't handle temperatures near freezing well; there's a lot of iguanas in southern Florida (who knew?), so there's dying iguanas falling out of trees and frozen stiff. Then dogs find them and think these are the greatest chew toys ever!

However, carcasses are also great incubators for botulinum bacteria, so the dogs get botulism (maybe...there's actually no confirmed clinical data, but it seems to make sense). Most of the dogs can recover, but it takes a week or two for the paralysis to wear off.

Oh, the joy of Promed Mail. Keeping me entertained when the snow plows wake me up too early.

Lots and none at all

2010-02-07T14:47:00.000-08:00

Today I have accomplished lots and nothing at all!

A roll of verbiage, just to get it out of my system:

I spent a lot of the day buffering e-mails between the big organization and the visiting organization, both of which were very confused about the schedule. It took me three sets of e-mails (received and response) to figure out that the problem arose from the misplacement of a date, not the actual deletion of it. If any of that makes sense. I always come out of these things grateful for peaceful resolution, and fervently hoping that no one is going to be angry at me. I can imagine several very specific complaints of negligence to lodge against myself, but I think part of that is paranoia.

And then I had a nice long conversation with my fiance, via Skype. It was the first time I've ever used the video function, so THAT was an adjustment. It didn't feel at first like I was actually talking to him, since I was so very obviously talking at a computer. And then it was hard to draw the conversation to a close (although it was getting on toward 11 pm his time, and he still had homework to do). I think we'll probably have to schedule it like dating, not too often and with a set time to sign off. But overall, a very cool piece of technology.

One thing that really irked me, though--his host mother apparently made some comment about how we were talking too much, and how a previous study-abroad student had spent too much time talking to his fiancee "and that was why they broke up." It's one of those cases where my first reaction is "why would she even bring this up?" And my second reaction is wrathful indignation. So I went and played angry piano for a while, which helped (okay, so Mozart's Sonata in C doesn't really qualify as "angry").

Okay, back to studying! Or, I guess, just to studying, since I haven't gotten around to it yet today.

Study plans

2010-02-06T09:40:00.001-08:00

My sister was in town the last couple of days for interviews, so we got to hang out and discuss important things like our complete failure to study enough. We're at different stages of education, of course, so the solutions we found are a little bit different. But I realized that I really just don't budget enough time to study. So the new plan is that I will actually map out two hour chunks of study time. Doing that for this weekend has revealed that I have already failed to plan enough time to study, and it's only noon on Saturday.

On the other hand, I had a wonderful two hour conversation with my fiance yesterday. (it was my congratulations-on-getting-there present for him: a couple of hours of conversation in English)

Hurrah for Skype! It's much easier to call foreign cell phones when you don't have to punch in twenty or thirty numbers to get through. This becomes much more significant when the foreign cell phone drops the call for the third or fourth time.

Whoops, that was an exam

2010-02-03T15:57:00.000-08:00

Fortunately it was a small exam. I really need to figure out how to remember drugs better, though. The same thing happened last year. I learned the concepts of drug therapy, and then ran out of time and just sort of glissed over the drugs. I wouldn't treat bacteriology this way! I just need to find a way to anthropomorphize ketamine, that's all. That way, when I am confronted with a table to fill out of five different drugs, I will remember which one is which, instead of staring at it dumbly, feeling all the information I knew running out the back of my head.

Minor plaint

2010-02-02T21:43:00.000-08:00

I want cake. I spent a very long time writing an e-mail, and I have an exam in the morning, and I have lab after exam, and who knows how many lectures. Also I am sleep deprived, emotionally wonky, and haven't gotten exercise today (snowing too much to go to dance practice, and my cranial tibial muscles hurt from overenthusiastic elliptical workout yesterday). I am struggling to finish going through the notes for anesthesia.

And I want cake.

*sigh*

Okay, back to opioid receptors.

It's a plan!

2010-01-31T06:59:00.000-08:00

I got called in yesterday--which worked out really well, in fact. Realistically, I would not have gotten around to studying anyway. As it was, the surgery was relatively quick (a back--over in three hours!), and fortunately there was no backlog of pans to sterilize in the CS for clean-up.

Also, one of the older surgeons was supervising. He was one of the ones who seems to have endless patience with students, always able to offer a bit of advice in such a way that you're glad to take it. He helped with the teching, which was good--I haven't been called in since fall, and I wasn't moving efficiently enough to have kept up with four surgeons (eh, two of them were students) and the anesthesiologists.

Today, though--I must study! But all my good intentions will run away if I don't set up a study plan, since I keep forgetting how many classes I have.

So!

1. Anesthesiology: set up a chart of the drugs we learned last week, review the calculations. Our first exam is Wednesday.

2. Parasitology: Chart out this week's life cycles. My goal is to hang them on the walls when I'm done, and I have a lot of wall space to cover!

3. Pathology: Review cardio, probably by looking at pictures and reading my notes aloud.

If I feel like it, I will tackle the most recent lecture, which had a lot of diagrams with horrible 60's era typeface. I have trouble keeping up with the professor, who rattles off the complicated proceedings of the endocrine system like an auctioneer at a cattle sale. But without repeating anything, ever. If you were a good student, you'd be paying attention and get it the first time, right? (To be fair, he's perfectly willing to stop and repeat something; it's just hard to recognize when you, the student, need to have it explained again. After all, the professor knows what he's talking about, so it sounds very reasonable when he says it.)

4. Clin path: Technically we have homework due tomorrow afternoon. Hm. In contrast to systemic pathology, the professor for this class has splendidly lucid lectures, so I can probably get away with reading through the notes.

5. And if there's any time left over, making flash cards for all of the above!

On 3 hours of sleep

2010-01-28T10:38:00.001-08:00

This afternoon: Studying! I have to catch up on clin path and parasitology, not to mention pharmacy/anesthesia and toxicology. We had a great tox lecture today--emergency triage! Tox promises to be one of the stranger classes, because the nature of toxicology is that you mostly just treat the symptoms. Knowing the specific toxin is great, but it often remains a mystery. But at the same time, you need to know enough to not kill the patient with the wrong treatment. For example, if a dog swallows rat poison, you want to make the dog vomit, right? But if the dog swallowed drain cleaner, which is a nasty caustic material, you want to get it out quickly, all one way--because making it come back out the way it went in can kill the mucosa.

The three hours of sleep is working out pretty well. I was terrible about studying last night; I managed to read some parasitology while going through bellydance exercises (holding up the textbook during shimmies made good upper-arm work-out, AND I learned about pinworms). But then I got distracted by the State of the Union speech and by waiting for a phone call.

The phone call was much later than expected, so I was up really late. We (officially engaged! I hadn't expected to find it so exciting!) had a lot to discuss, including whether it's appropriate to fax letters to a study-abroad student at his school, if the letters are not in the target language. I mean, phone calls are great. But they have no physical presence, and no permanence. I like writing letters, I like having them arrive sooner than six weeks after I send them (or potentially as few as 2 weeks *gasp*), and I have a fax machine.

But...say, I've always wanted to learn Russian. I don't know that in the middle of vet school is quite the ideal time, but you have to start sometime.

Hours

2010-01-26T01:37:00.001-08:00

I'm going for a thirty hour day. My boyfriend (actually, I've upgraded him to fiance), has a flight to his study-abroad orientation in two hours that I am helping him catch. Then I have to sit through five lectures. I haven't gotten sleep in the last twenty-three hours, because I was at the CDC Day for Vet Students, and subsequent flight problems meant I almost didn't get home today (tonight? This morning?) at all. As a result, I'm high-strung and mellow at the same time. I was terrified I wasn't going to get home in time, that my boyfriend was going to have to leave before I had a chance to see him, and that I was going to be stuck in a huge airport overnight on top of it all.

There weren't even really any problems at the airport where I was supposed to make my connecting flight--they just took so long to clear the gate of the previous plane that I missed the connection by five minutes. At that point it was eight hours until my boyfriend's flight, and there were absolutely no planes going to my home airport. Thank goodness for long-distance buses (definitely more comfortable, considering my current head-cold). And parents who are willing to stay up an extra four hours to pick me up from the bus stop. And the boyfriend, of course, who was very good about letting me decompress via cell phone.

All of this for the CDC. I have to admit, the margin of value has gotten really, really narrow. But I think, overall, it was still worth it. Oddly enough, I think I got as much out of the eight-hour delay on Sunday (planes and I really are not getting along this week). One of the professors from my school went to the same event, and we had the same (delayed) flight. Usher in long conversation about the school's curriculum and how useful it is to practice in a clinic before branching out into public health. Between that, applying for a USDA summer program, and the CDC event, I think I'm career-dayed out. Time for some straight-up clin path! And some really, really strong black tea.

The terror begins...

2010-01-20T20:38:00.000-08:00

We have so many classes this semester: systemic pathology, clinical pathology, parasitology, toxicology, pharmacology, anesthesia (to switch over to surgery midway through the semester), and at some point, infectious disease recitation. Eek! I checked out half a dozen textbooks from the library, so I can figure out which ones I might actually need to buy and scribble all over. Pharm and pathology have returned to haunt me; I barely scraped through the first iteration of those classes. I considered checking out Goodman and Gilman, but the fact it's as large as a breadbox dissuaded me. Instead I found a "Quick Look Series" workbook on pharmacology, which actually is remarkably clear and relevant.

My schedule is doubly complicated by the trips I'm already committed to taking. Fortunately they're in these first weeks of school, so in theory I won't be able to fall too far behind. However...it turns out that the Western Veterinary Conference is the same week I have three exams in a row. And I'm taking a red-eye flight back, to arrive half an hour before the first exam is supposed to start. Um. Perhaps I can take that one a week early? How much can they really cover in the two intervening lectures anyway?

On the plus side, the boyfriend is going to be studying abroad all semester. This doesn't sound too great from the stand point of back rubs and needing someone to remind me not to panic; but, at least I get lots of evenings free to study.

Gearing up

2010-01-15T22:41:00.000-08:00

I think I'm going to break my rule of no movies on school nights for the first week of school. My boyfriend and I are still working on the list of things he wants to see before heading off to the wonderful world of Russia (which conceivably has iffy cinema availability). However, I'm also going to try to work around that time constraint and stay on top of things. To that end, I will put fifty dollars on my print card and schedule an afternoon on the school's computer lab. I _really_ don't want to routinely miss the first five minutes of class trying to print out the lecture notes. There's always a mad rush, and I always end up losing a couple of print-outs by the time I start the review for exams.

I made it through my entire e-mail inbox too! I'm mostly caught up, but I get this knee-jerk reaction now when I come across the one or two items I've been putting off for months. They've been lying in wait for this day, I swear they have.

visiting cats

2010-01-13T22:15:00.000-08:00

The best part about visiting the farm without the boyfriend is that I get to cuddle with the cats. I have Nanner, a petite tortie, on my lap right now and Beezle, the black and white pigeon-eating monster, is making bizarre whistling noises a few feet away. I generally have to watch my cat exposure carefully, lest I convey cat dander to any of my cat-allergic friends.

Since the boyfriend actually like cats, I can conceivably talk him into allergy shots and then we could have a cat. How well do allergy shots really work? We learned about them briefly in immunology: the repeated introduction of small amounts of allergen gradually switch the immune response from TH2 to TH1. The TH2 path involves immunoglobulin E, which triggers histamine release and the well-known effects of allergy, ex. constricted airways, runny nose, swelling, etc. The TH1 pathway, on the other hand, has less drastic effects on the body, since the production of immunoglobulin switches from IgE to IgG. IgG does not trigger histamine release. In addition, T-cells that react to the specific antigen eventually become anergic.

Now if only all autoimmune diseases were so easy to understand, we'd be set.

Self diagnosis

2010-01-10T17:23:00.000-08:00

So the question is what exactly brought on persistent cramps today? My bet is on a combination of raw carrots and iron supplement, on top of my GI tract's general disgruntlement with the world ever since I forced metronidazole on it. However, the reuben sandwich (with extra sauerkraut) and coleslaw may have also acted as predisposing forces. Starting last night and continuing all of today, I've been doubling over every couple of minutes with a fresh round of abdominal pain. I'd been a bit tender in increasing increments after Wednesday's endoscopy, but this is actual pain.

And it's exhausting. It's a good thing our winter break goes for three weeks, because I can't imagine how I would handle classes on top of this. As it is, I don't see a way I can keep up the surgery tech job. Sometimes I feel fine (well, not this week so much, actually). But it's so unpredictable, I don't think there's any way I could ensure I'd be able to work any given night. I know that there's never a way to guarantee you won't come down with a stomach bug on a day you have to work, but I think you can usually count on not having that problem a routine basis.

My hope is that with meds and very careful eating, I won't have this set of problems during school. Even if I do, there's a trance-like quality to studying which can cover up minor discomfort.

I find it interesting that I am much less resistant to the idea of starting meds before seeing the doctor once I'm actually in pain. "Gimme anything that'll help!"

Hopefully the copious amounts of gatorade, pepto bismol, and avoidance of carrots will do the trick and I'll be back to normal tomorrow.

To med or not to med

2010-01-09T07:18:00.000-08:00

Did I mention I don't like medicine that's happening to me? Iron was fine, that was a nice, straightforward solution. And it miraculously made all the other symptoms decrease so much that I was happy to consider them gone. Now that I'm paying more attention to it, I realize that they aren't really gone, just masked a bit. The abdominal pain is still there, but so damped down that I don't really consider it pain--just a constant slight unease, like I overate and just have to wait it out. It's easy to ignore moment to moment.

I should be glad that things with the doctors are moving along so fast. I'm sure if they were't I would be fretting my guts out (wait, didn't I already sort of do that?). However, I think I might not have minded having a day or two to pretend that things are normal. As my doctor sister pointed out, nothing has really changed.

The meds in question are asacol and prednisone. Prednisone is one of those scary names, which I prefer to apply to other people's (or dogs') treatment plans. I never heard anything about asacol until being told I was supposed to take nine tablets a day of it. The internet being what it is, it's way too easy to find all the bad effects people have suffered from these drugs.

Sedation, woo hoo!

2010-01-06T18:21:00.001-08:00

Finishing off the PEG was only possible with the aid of much cinnamon chewing gum and a relatively mindless Heinlein book. It takes a lot of concentrated sipping to get down a gallon of PEG. It tastes like slightly salty water, but just a little off--almost as though it was slightly salty water that happens to be completely indigestible. Surprise!

Then it was off to the hospital. I wasn't very relaxed. The IV line going in hurt just like someone jabbed a small tube in through the back of my hand (funny, that).

Once they had me settled on the gurney, the soft spoken doctor came and told me about the procedure in a lot less detail than I already knew. The nurse started the fentanyl. I suppose it might have stung a bit going in, but the IV line was already making my hand sting pretty badly, so I wasn't sure. Then I guess the stuff hit my system, because suddenly my chest tightened and I sort of squeaked out, "I'm having trouble breathing!" The thought that flashed through my mind: I don't know that I'm not allergic to benadryl, and the lungs are the anaphylactic shock organ in people...

But then my breathing eased up just as suddenly. The nurse asked cheerfully, "Is the room spinning yet?"
"Yeah, actually," I said.

Then I was lying on my side, very groggy, and wondering if they were going to start the procedure yet. It took about a minute for me to wake up enough to realize that I was in a totally different room now--two hours later.

Once I was more or less awake, I got to see the pictures of my colon. Well, no wonder I've been having digestive problems for years! A number of ulcers, some that look fairly minor, a couple that are probably more concerning. I'm not in a position to make any diagnoses though. That's why I have another appointment next week, to find out what the gastroenterologists conclude.

And in the meantime, I get to eat food again!

Jello vs. truffles

2010-01-05T07:59:00.000-08:00

In honor of my imminent 2-day eating ban, I had huge dinner last night: steak, mashed potatoes, and green pepper and mushroom saute. But before that--I made truffles! I've made them before, but only the solid ganache version where you roll them in cocoa powder under the supposition that this prevents them sticking to your hands on the trip to your mouth.

This time, I made a special trip to the local cake decorating store and got a truffle mold.* Ooo, ahh.* I almost got one while I was in Vegas, visiting the land of Sur la Table, but I couldn't think of a good way to pack it. And this way I was able to peruse the rack of concentrated flavorings, which has tempting flavors such as amaretto and blackberry.

Then to the kitchen! I improvised a double boiler with a bowl that I believe started life as a dog food dish, but has seen much use here and in the dorms. I had two types of chocolate: the Trader Joe's pound-o-dark, and the Scharffen Berger elitist bar. The elitist was a pale tan color, since it's been sitting in my cupboard for a year (or two? I don't recall...) and bloomed more than a bank of day lilies. But hey, all things chocolate are fixed by melting! I added in some 99%, too, for that special bitter flavor. I originally had three bars of Scharffen Berger in different grades of sweetness, but I ate the mildest long ago.

The elitist went for lining the mold. The pound-o-dark went for ganache. I had trouble with it--it decided to go all watery and clumpy on me. Adding more chocolate helped smooth it, at least enough so it didn't separate on the spot. I scooped out half to make pure dark chocolate truffles out of, then tried a touch of amaretto.
Meh.
Orange?
Hey...
I revised my plan for dark chocolate truffles to include dark chocolate + orange truffles.

Once they'd set and I'd figured out how to remove them from the mold (one truffle died bravely in my attempts to pry it out with a metal skewer) I tried one of the orange. It was like...like...like a real truffle! I forced one on my boyfriend, who made gratifyingly surprised sounds, and I wrapped up the remainder for my mom, the true chocolate connoisseur. *

Now today I keep looking over at them and then back at my little bowl of pineapple jello. I mean, I like jello. It's the closest thing to real food I'm allowed to eat for the next thirty hours. But the only thing it has in common with truffles is that they both come out of molds.

*EDIT: My mom was not enthusiastic. She felt the truffles were much too dark, with not enough mild flavor for contrast. *sigh*

It turns out...

2010-01-04T22:36:00.001-08:00

I like medicine, but not when it's happening to me.

The main thing I remembered about metronidazole is that in our chart for bacteriology, it listed possible side effects: "GI upset" GI upset fails to describe the potential for stomach-knotting pain and uneasy nausea. Sadly, I didn't make it through the full 10 days, so the chances are I'll have to take something like it again. I spent most of my supposed vacation with family in Vegas huddled on a couch, while my GI microflora learned about living in a world with metronidazole. I was cheated out of three days of eating! In Las Vegas!

Now that I actually have doctors looking at my persistent anemia and vague GI symptoms, they want to do all sorts of things to me. The antibiotic was just the start. I spent the morning sitting in the gastro office, facing a very nice poster that details every thing that can go wrong with your digestive system from the esophagus down. I did not find it comforting.

If it were my dog (who, incidentally, ripped his scalp open yesterday and needed sutures) I would be all for finding a diagnosis. As it is, I have trouble. My constellation of symptoms indicate what I always suspected, that my GI tract is a lemon (more of an orange...I mean, it's worked okay so far). How do you fix that? It's not like you can replace it. I just spent a year and a half learning how irreplaceable the digestive system is. I also learned that imaging is often the biggest part of medicine. To illustrate this point, they have to look at my digestive system, which means endoscopes. Endoscopes mean sedation to the verge of unconsciousness, so I won't even be able to write it off as a learning experience. (someone, quick, invent an effective ultrasound scan!)

And I'm getting cheated out of two more days of eating. Hmph.

Cleancleanclean

2009-12-25T12:24:00.001-08:00

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!

2009-12-25T07:42:00.000-08:00

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...

2009-12-16T12:53:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-10T13:35:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-10T12:50:00.001-08:00

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

2009-12-07T17:17:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-12-05T09:19:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-29T06:20:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-26T09:19:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-13T20:29:00.000-07:00

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*

2009-10-07T18:33:00.001-07:00

*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

2009-10-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-15T14:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-13T16:50:00.000-07:00

*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)

2009-09-07T07:35:00.001-07:00

(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

2009-08-31T08:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-27T09:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-23T22:13:00.001-07:00

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!

2009-08-10T14:00:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

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..."

2009-06-25T07:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-18T18:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-01T13:27:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-12T19:33:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-11T13:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-04-30T17:21:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-17T16:34:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-16T16:43:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-07T08:45:00.001-08:00

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

2009-02-23T19:38:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-12T11:01:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-29T10:28:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-26T08:58:00.000-08:00

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!")

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

2008-12-17T10:30:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-14T16:55:00.001-08:00

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!

2008-12-06T18:06:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-16T18:51:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-12T20:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-04T16:02:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-02T20:20:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-09-04T13:01:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-08-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

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.

Day Two

2008-08-22T21:35:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-20T07:14:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-16T15:04:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-08-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-04T17:37:00.000-07:00

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?!"