Joys of vodka

Things to do with vodka:

Make vanilla extract
Make amaretto
Use as a fluidizer for hydrophobic pharmacological drugs
Rescue cats from antifreeze poisoning

I've only done the first two, myself, but according to one of the doctors at the school the bit about cats is true. See, anti-freeze does terrible things to an animal (or small child) that consumes it. It gets into the gears of metabolism and gums them up, by latching onto a particular enzyme that deals with alcohol (which does show up as a by product of a working organism). Puppies like anti-freeze because it tastes sweet, so they show up in emergency rooms not infrequently. For them the antidote works fine. It was developed for people, of course, but you just dose the dog on the same basic parameters.

In cats, however, the antidote doesn't work, at least not nearly so easily. By sextupling the dose, it turns out it works just fine, but it took a few years to figure that out. In the meantime, vets found they could treat cats by dosing them with ethanol--i.e. alcohol--which kept enough alcohol-metabolizing enzymes busy that they didn't get dead-ended by the antifreeze. Bodies are pretty good at getting rid of toxins eventually. The cat would get over the poisoning, albeit with a nasty hangover.

Long live novel uses for liquor.

Really ought-tos

I really ought to study more.
I really ought to get more sleep.
I really ought to get fewer groceries (but...chocolate!)
I really ought to not sign up for an overloaded semester...oh, wait, already did.

It's hard to be enthusiastic in anything other than short bursts right now. I like when school is neat, clean, limited to lecture halls and labs with pristine microscopes. But this semester I'm dissecting cows and horses, and must venture out every week to work with live ones in a cold barn. I'm dreading the commute more than anything. And some part of my brain decided it would be good experience for me to sign up for shifts in the large animal barn and a job in the small animal surgery. Which, since they are considerate of students having lecture during the day, has all the shifts going from 6:30 pm to 8 am the next morning. Granted, it's on call, but then that just means getting called in at 4 am, the morning of a school day. And buses don't run at that time. Was I insane? *nodding head vigorously*

But all this griping is done on the assumption that I'm temporarily ruffled and, once I start in on all of the above, its sheer fascinatingness will win me over.

For now, though, hand me the chocolate.

Back to school

But first, a diverting experience with stomach flu! Diverting thanks to online episodes of television I would otherwise never watch. Not to mention real-life experience with gastrointestinal nervous system. It's nice to go over that sort of thing in lecture the same day it happens to you. And everyone else in the country, apparently. Turns out there's been a lot of stomach pain on both coasts, and in the middle. No pun intended.

The nifty thing this semester is that there's light when we get out of class at 4:30 now, even if it's currently gray. Gray sky, gray smokestacks, and massive heaps of snow. Makes being inside all the time seem okay. Classes aren't quite so riveting as last semester, though. The first semester of vet school they gave us the best professors, and we were learning anatomy and physiology finally at the level of detail that I suspected might exist but rarely found in undergrad. Plus we had histology, and how cool is that?

The un-nifty thing is a weekly trip to the local cow&horse facility. That would be okay, the part that is sad is that they aren't offering any help at all as far as transportation goes. Whee, carpooling. (Not much enthusiasm here, although that might have something to do with the hour long lecture on "horses come in different colors!")

Whooa-ee--oo!--agh--ummm (interpretive sounds of the last two days)

Only a couple more to go! I accomplished a perfect score on the Developmental anatomy exam, which was quickly overshadowed by what appeared to be my brain's decision to forget everything I ever knew about histology. So I did what any sane person would do and had a panic attack, made chocolate cake, and then spent the rest of the night studying. And I think I did okay. In histo I tend to get answers wrong if I don't know them for sure, but that seemed to be a much smaller portion of the exam than stuff I did know. So, yay.

Today is a study day. Physiology. The bus to school never did show up, so I had to take an alternative bus route to get within walking distance (actually, I probably could have walked in the amount of time I spent waiting for the darn thing, but that would have defeated the point of public transportation, no?). And now it's high time to study.

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.

Dance!

So, the vet students got completely left out of this year's malpractice ball, since snooty med and law students figured we weren't professional enough to merit more than a handful of tickets to the annual dance...as a result, the vet students banded together to have their own dance, which is tonight.

I've never actually been to a non-ballroom student org dance before, so I keep worrying that they won't have danceable music. I wouldn't know what to do at a dance if there was no dancing. By which I mean hustle, waltz, and cha-cha (all other types negotiable but not necessary). It will be interesting... Not least because most of the students are going to be stressing to some degree or other about upcoming finals. Eek! One week! Not enough time to cram! I was only a moderately decent student today, but I figure I get points for going to the vet school at 7:30 am on a Saturday to hunch over a cadaver for three or four hours. This afternoon slunk away on me though--after talking with a couple people, having lunch, and reading a bit, it was suddenly well into the evening.

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)