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

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

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

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

School rumbling on the horizon

So.

Second year!

Oh boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Studying! Always there to improve!

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

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

Scarf done!

Warning: weaving jargon follows


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

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

Fiber arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breeding cows and washing drills

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

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

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

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

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

Sick and achey

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

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