Conferences and wetlabs

Once again I'm studying for a physiology exam, although the students banded together this time and talked the professors into pushing it back until Wednesday. Good thing too, as I haven't really had any weekend for studying for a couple of weeks now. I spent my weekends on good, honorable vet student things, but studying for upcoming exams? Not so much.

The first amazingly cool way to spend a weekend was the Marine Mammal Conference. This consisted of two mornings of lectures about whale evolution, seal medicine, and things you never knew about manatees (they like power plants). I may have to write an entire separate post on manatees. They're just that cool.

The afternoons we spent in lab, becoming acquainted with ten seal cadavers. Saturday we basically just stood around and poked them. A few lucky people did cerebral spinal fluid taps, but there wasn't much CSF to be had. Lots of ultrasounding though. A guy from a big ultrasound equipment company was there with a half dozen primo machines. He didn't seem so nervous about them as the techs were. I got snapped at by one lady for handing an ultrasound wand (yeah, there's a real term for it, but I don't recall what it is) to another student.

"Put that back on the table--that way there's no way it can get dropped," she said. But really, if we had dropped it, it only would have landed on soft seal carcass...

And Sunday afternoon, us lucky ones who got into the limited-space lab got to dissect the seals. Since I'm a first year, all dissections are still cool, although much of the comparative anatomy is lost on me. "Hey look, that's the liver!"
"Do you notice anything about that liver? Like that it's only partially lobed..."
"Nope! But it's definitely a liver! And hey, look, a kidney! Say, these legs don't look quite like the dog cadaver..."

And the whole conference was made additionally fun by houseguests. I hosted a couple of students who have far more aquatics experience than I. They too had exams the following week. So, although this did not mean any of us studied over the weekend (much) no one complained about going to bed on time.

This weekend was nearly as much fun as far as labs go. We had a wet lab for critical care yesterday. Somewhere they had obtained a towering cart of recently deceased dogs for us to practice life-saving techniques on. Almost every place you can stick a tube we did, and a couple of other places too. The dog my partner and I had was a bit more gone than most of the others. Green on the edges. But she was a good dog...This is something that gets said a lot during lab. After a bit of joking around, someone says with genuine feeling, "But it's a good dog."

So that was Saturday. Today I woke up, studied...

I would have had much more time to study today, but I foolishly thought I could do some errands "quickly". Hah! I admit it gave me great joy to buy things at the used bookstore. It gave me less joy to stand in line at the craft store while two cashiers tried to deal with the Sunday afternoon horde of shoppers. At least I have finally obtained the materials I need to carry out a commission I got, what, last spring?

But now it's time to go learn more about cardiovascular physiology. Just one more exam and then it's Thanksgiving! (give or take a week)