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. 

Training does not have to equal train wreck

I am relieved to discover that after three days of full time work, I appear to have some idea of what I'm doing as a tech. Of course, now I've come down with a horrendously sore throat and still have the prospect of a two more eleven-hour work days this week, but hey, at least I have today off. The supervisor was terribly worried that I traded off an on-call shift three weeks from now, because how on earth will I get experience working in the OR? Aside from, y'know, the EXTRA DAY THIS WEEK that was the other part of the trade.

I was also glad to hear from my dad that, no, his clinic doesn't tell techs to "just dive in," and leave the training at that. They hire all certified techs, first of all, not random first year vet students, and they still have a very well defined training program the techs go through. 

One of my observations from work yesterday is that, as wonderfully effective as learning through (devastatingly bad) experience is, it means no one is sure what everyone else knows. We're just suppose to train ourselves so well we know everything. So we end up with things like an entire batch of medical equipment to resterilize, because one of the student techs didn't realize that the pointy ends were going to poke through the wrappers. It wasn't me! It was one of the "dive right in" proponents, ironically enough. 

Enough blathering for today. It's time for another dose of vitamin C and hot tea.

Rant

Summer...a time of relaxation and recuperation from a tough semester. Or not. I had been really really hoping I wouldn't get called in on Sunday, since I didn't realize until Friday afternoon that I was going to be on call, and I hadn't spent time learning to be a surgery tech since before exams. 

And let's face it, I never really got a good chunk of training any time over the semester. Pretty much ever since the second week after being hired I've known this was not what I wanted to do, though I'll blame it on the stunning lack of any training program for student surgery techs. How much training do real surgery techs get? I'm sure it's more than "whenever you have a spare moment to be in the clinic." Not to mention "Don't worry, you'll learn it on the job this summer."

Ideally I should have been smart enough to not sign up so quickly and willingly, or at least, in that second week, to have returned to the person who hired me and said, "Look, I didn't fully understand what the job entailed, I have significantly more time committed to labs for class than your other student workers, is there a way to work this out?"

Actually, truly ideally they would give you a chance to shadow someone for a full shift before even hiring, so that they get a student who wants to work there, rather than someone who has been told "It's such a terrific opportunity, it's really easy, all you have to do is [simple, minor time commitment]." And then have a trainee manual, which has all of the relevant information for the job (like, on which one of the multitude of calendars you are supposed to put your on-call contact info, and where to find keys for the supply room).  

What sparked this off was me getting called in on Sunday and being an incompetent idiot. I don't like being an incompetent idiot, even when another student charitably comes in and takes over. I didn't know even how to open the supply room to get the surgery supplies, so it was assumed I don't know how to set up for surgery. Throughout the surgery I found other ways to screw up. At least I knew how to clean the room afterward. Then we were called in again, an hour later, adding up to 8 hours of frustrated efforts to be competent.

Unfortunately I'm the sort of person who generally ascribes all problems to her own failings, so most of the semester I was thinking, "I just need to work harder, it's my fault I'm having so much trouble." Add in lack of people skills and confidence to use them (I've been working on that), which makes asking for help that much more difficult. So it was my own fault I didn't speak up to the (extremely unsympathetic) student in charge of scheduling, my own fault I didn't learn everything I needed to know on the job, and my own fault I was having so much trouble with classes that I was spending a lot of afternoons trying to keep up with school rather than learning how to do a job where I was told "Don't worry, you'll learn it this summer." Well, it turns out I am  learning it this summer, the hard way, inconveniencing other people and really stressing out myself.

As a communications major, it astonishes me that the OR of a well-respected clinic has such a dearth of training policy that an inept student remains inept for so long, and then is expected to know everything they need to when the learning of it is left entirely to chance and the assumed tenacity of the student. There is no manual to refer to, there is no effort made to introduce the student to the job. I did not know that veterinary surgery endorsed the discovery learning method.

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.