Surgery: Anatomy, Art

Today for surgery class (i.e. sit in lecture hearing the basics once, so that next year we cannot say things like, "I've never heard of ___, how do you expect me to know about it?") we're covering anatomy.

So far: anatomy is important.

Anatomy has important implications for suture. Last week we went over suture, so in theory this all makes perfect sense, at any rate makes more sense than enzymology in clin path. In all fairness, the clin path professors do a terrific job, and I'm sure by the time we have an exam, enzymology will make more sense than whatever the next topic is going to be.

Anatomy has been occupying me outside of lecture recently. An artist friend of mine discovered anatomy last year by way of a life drawing class. All of a sudden her sketches of people included such innovative things as triceps. (This year I'm going to be taking the same class, actually, although for different reasons--my drawing skills need help. I know where the muscles are, I'm just lousy at delineating them.) She would like to now spread the joy of knowledge, so we're working on an anatomy workshop for fantasy artists. It will have skulls. If I could, I would bring in a horse leg with intact suspensory apparatus, but that's probably a bit beyond the scope of a one-hour talk that is starting out with "This is a skeleton..."

One down

Small Animal Anatomy is over and I'm still standing. The written exam was horrible...we'd already spent two hours in lab, and I was drifting off as I read through the test. I roused myself to actual concentration on the second run through it. Then people collected in the lounge afterward and discussed the exam with varying degrees of enthusiasm. For a while we had a crowd students in one corner of "The answer was definitely 'e'." But, those of us who said "a" were vindicated in the end when the professors posted the key. Ha-Hah! There are always the questions you get wrong, and then there are the questions that you get wrong and take personally. Darn you, muscles-innervated-by-musculocutanous-nerve!

I have come to the conclusion that I hate studying for exams. Next semester I plan to spend my time every week in fervent study, for the sheer purpose of being able to goof off for a few hours before actual exams. It will be completely worth it. Sooooo worth it. As it is, I have to go study fervently for the few hours (17 and counting) until my next exam.

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.

Scalpels are fun!

So far things are working today...I woke up, ate breakfast and rushed to class. I hold that I got there exactly on time, but realistically I was probably ten seconds late. And it was anatomy, too, which starts promptly and doesn't slow down until every last nanosecond has been eked out of the 50 minutes.

Histology doesn't have this problem. Histology, the professors just blithely keep going until they've finished whatever they're talking about, and graciously allow us to be late for lab. Since it's the lab for histology, they can do that.

Two labs today, wherein we learned that
1. As long as you are doing something interesting, like slicing away the cobwebby connective tissue (fascia) between muscles, you CAN survive a three hour lab.*
2. Histology lab is nice. It's clean, it's peaceful, you get a comfy swivel chair to sit on.
3. Your locker will smell forevermore of formaldehyde once you leave your labcoat in there.

Yesterday I learned that I officially know nothing about anatomy. I was good up until I had to identify the greater tubercle of the humerus. "The what-of-the--oh, I'm supposed to know that?" It had never occurred to me that I would be foiled by the complexity of a single bone. The darn thing has, like, a dozen parts! And it's the easy one.

It looks like, for the most part, people are done with excessive sociability. The first few days, you have to introduce yourself to everyone and try to remember horribly difficult things, like what their names are. Now that the classes are starting, we have more important things to remember. Like, when is lunch? Socializing now entails only knowing enough about your lab partners to remember which one has the bone box.

And the last new thing today: the joy of a nat across the road. Finally, reaching the place of exercise takes less time than the exercise itself. I went swimming. It was good. It wiped out the formaldehyde smell.

*EDIT: Four years later I now know I was having some major health issues at this time that made it physically challenging to stand for an hour, but their onset had been so subtle I hadn't realized when I wrote this that three hours, while not easy, was not leaving my classmates pale, weak and wondering how they were going to survive the semester. That was all the other classes.

Day Two

And where is Day One, you ask?

Well, that was yesterday, y'see. That was all orientation games and eating tacos, waaay too many cookies, and signing up for every club the vet school offers. There are fifteen, no kidding. But no vet schoolish stuff, per se. The closest we came was the carefully timed attack of the cute, fluffy, up-for-adoption puppy. Those sneaky vets from the clinic brought her around during the tacos, while people's guard was down in anticipation of food.

Today was bones in the anatomy lab. Each group got a box with bones from one side of a dog skeleton. My group dumped the bones out on the table, picked out as many as we could (5) and spent the next hour trying to decide what the other 30 or so were. Vertebrae? Oh, definitely. The question is whether any given piece was cervical, thoracic, or lumbar. Or coaxal. Or not actually from the backbone at all. We had that little problem with the atlas, which I'm still not sure what it is.

Later, after the scheduled activities, a good chunk of the student body ventured out to the Union. I think most of them were after the beer, but a good minority recognized the true purpose of socializing on the Terrace, which is to provide an excuse for ice cream. Raspberry cheesecake shall haunt my dreams...I got my fave, choc chip cookie dough, but a taste of the raspberry severely shook my resolve.

Being vet students who are not yet privy to each others' deepest secrets (like what do you really think of your lab partners), the conversations were terrific. Lots of horror stories about pitbulls and reminiscing about undergrad physics exams.