Total Expiration

The way our physiology professor describes a breathing test (like you'd do for asthma) is all in a sort of monotone voice and goes like this: "Breathe in. No, all the way, don't be wimp. Now breathe out, keep going, stop being a wimp..."

Vet school is a little like that. "Learn this, all of it, don't be a wimp, here's some more."

In the past, the thought crossed my mind that there's a lot of medicine that, to be honest, isn't that hard. I've tubed lambs and vaccinated cows, even helped set a few broken legs, and none of that was really challenging once you get the hang of it. So what in med school is worth thousands of dollars a year? What sort of information is so hard to get at, and so valuable, that only doctors have it?

The word exhaustive comes to mind. (ex. drug interactions, though that's a topic for another day)

Anatomy lab is a pretty unique thing. It's not so hard, maybe, to get a dog that died and dissected it. But it's hard to learn every muscle as you go along, and it's definitely hard to get two dozen dog cadavers together and look at all of them. But we do that. It's incredibly expensive to make the special stained slides of two hundred different tissues that we put under microscopes for histology, but every student gets a box of those for the year too. When I get home I try to tell the most interesting things I learned to whatever family or hapless friends are around, but it doesn't do it justice. There's the facts, and there's the facts that I'll remember. In undergrad, I maybe retained half of what my classes presented (hopefully the right half). In vet school, it's all important, and it just keeps adding up. Learning the muscles is like learning the alphabet: yes, you have to know all of the letters.

And in many ways, that makes it easier to learn. It has a purpose, it has a direction. I've been advised to read James Herriot once in a while, after class, to remind me what I'm going to class for. It's not to take tests. Tests are a means to an end, to learn what still needs to be learned. In the end, it comes back to the animals and the people they are important to.

Incidentally, a fun thing about being a vet student: you can walk up to random people who are out with their dog and say, "Hi, I just noticed your beautiful dog {dachsund/wolfhound/mutt). Would it be okay if I pet him? I'm a vet student!"

I mean, not that you couldn't randomly pet strangers' dogs anyway. It just gives you a really good excuse :)

One month in (almost), and some other lessons I've learned:

1. There's no such thing as eating half a donut at the morning lecture.
2. Looking at cells through a microscope is more fun than it sounds like.
3. Intervertebral disks have the prettiest cartilage. (it dyes electric blue!)
4. One hour in lab equals two hours of studying, because one hour in lab can feel like THREE hours of studying.
5. There are more parts to a bone than you ever knew.
5.a. And you have to know all of them.
5.b. Ditto for muscles.
6. Radiology is NOT nap time.
6.a. But that ten minutes between classes IS.
7. Free pizza lunch lectures don't come with dessert. Stock your locker with cookies.
8. And for my boyfriend: you know you're with a vet student when she wants to hold your hand...so she can practice identifying muscle attachments.