Blue Coat Ceremony

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

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

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

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

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

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

path studying

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.

Minor plaint

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.

Finals tomorrow...

Why aren't I studying? AAargh!

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

A difference between year 1 and year 2

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

One down

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

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

Dance!

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

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

Conferences and wetlabs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Physiology, with a break for giraffes

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

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

Meltdown

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

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

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

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

Like, oh, studying comes to mind.