How to relax (or not)

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

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

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

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*

*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

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

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).