TGIT

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

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

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

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

Neuro = headache

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

Then, this afternoon...

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

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

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

That's my little pep talk for myself.

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

High time for cookies

Large animal anatomy today.

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

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

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

 

Getting sick just in time for finals

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

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

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

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

One down

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

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

Physiology, with a break for giraffes

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

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