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.

It's a plan!

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

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

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...

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

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

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.