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.