It snowed, but was otherwise a fantastic day of walking past hundreds of horses. I know only a little about horses, but my mom knows tons, so I talked her into coming and imparting some of her knowledge to me. For instance, conformation. I can judge a beef cow pretty competently, same for a sheep, and I can get by when it comes to dairy cows and chickens. But horses, not so much. For one thing, I get distracted by how high on their heads their eyes are (cows' eyes are lower down). It's an odd thing to trip up on, but there you go. And I still get confused by their legs, despite the fact I spent an entire semester dissecting a pony cadaver. As soon as I try to think about the fact their front knees are equivalent to our wrist joint, I just lose it and can't even figure out the proportions.
So it was helpful to have someone along who was willing to spend two hours pointing out the differences between haflingers and quarterhorses, Belgians and Andalusians, pacers and standardbreds, and then quiz me on them. There were a few horses with really lousy conformation too (or so I was told), so I was gradually able to start piecing things together. I have apparently been mistaken for years about what "dish-faced" actually means. I think I interpreted it as being concave between the eyes, sort of "a la bovine", when actually it's the nose below that. I also learned that you aren't supposed to pet stallions on the nose/upper lip area, even though they twitch their lips and give every appearance of enjoying it, since that can give them bad habits that lead to biting. And I finally can make sense of an anecdote my mom likes about one of her horses that she described as having "little boxes" on his legs. I couldn't tell you which horses have "good" boxy joints, but I could at least tell there was a difference between the two morgans she was using as the examples.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Blue Coat Ceremony
We had our version of eighth-grade graduation for school today, where they told us all the wonderfully stressful things that will happen to us in our final year and how we are going to be lucky to get three hours of sleep per night. And any food other than take-out pizza. Thanks, all, that was very inspiring...
So I'm feeling the need to study even more than usual. So much need, I'm actually studying! (Until I started writing this blog post...) Except my lecture notes have been making me fall asleep. I took a break and set up pizza (good pizza, not silly take-out pizza) and bread dough. My favorite bread, too, a delectable oats&honey loaf. I took a break from making it because I was having trouble NOT eating it, and I was worried about gaining weight. As I have now gained weight anyway, even without tasty bread, there seems no point in making anything less than delectable. At least this way I stand of a chance of turning down the many less appealing foods that might tempt me, since they are just SO obviously inferior.
As for next year, though...eeeh. I will have to talk with my GI doctor, but I suspect if I try to do the no-sleep, lousy-food, high-stress routine they tell us we are in for, I will relapse and be miserable. I already feel like I'm balanced way too precariously on the edge of prepared/not prepared--like I am going to have to put more effort into relearning things because I only half-learned them the first time. It doesn't help that the last exam for large animal really, really underscored the
So it will be dependent on my ability to generate a sense of zen and peacefulness despite all the craziness, ultimately. No pressure.
I take comfort in the conversation I had with one of our professors, who said, "4th year doesn't have to be as stressful as people find it..." I'm not sure exactly how one goes about making it non-stressful, but the fact the bf is spending the summer off on his own special learning experience will definitely free up my time for rotations. I really slacked off on learning russian this last year, though, so it's going to be a tough time not talking with him--as part of his program, he is supposed to keep communication in any other languages to a minimum. I can still send him pictures, he can still write me letters (if they're in russian).
But in the meantime, I must figure out this zen thing. Hmmm, how to be zen while studying three years worth of material on top of daily lectures and clinics...
So I'm feeling the need to study even more than usual. So much need, I'm actually studying! (Until I started writing this blog post...) Except my lecture notes have been making me fall asleep. I took a break and set up pizza (good pizza, not silly take-out pizza) and bread dough. My favorite bread, too, a delectable oats&honey loaf. I took a break from making it because I was having trouble NOT eating it, and I was worried about gaining weight. As I have now gained weight anyway, even without tasty bread, there seems no point in making anything less than delectable. At least this way I stand of a chance of turning down the many less appealing foods that might tempt me, since they are just SO obviously inferior.
As for next year, though...eeeh. I will have to talk with my GI doctor, but I suspect if I try to do the no-sleep, lousy-food, high-stress routine they tell us we are in for, I will relapse and be miserable. I already feel like I'm balanced way too precariously on the edge of prepared/not prepared--like I am going to have to put more effort into relearning things because I only half-learned them the first time. It doesn't help that the last exam for large animal really, really underscored the
So it will be dependent on my ability to generate a sense of zen and peacefulness despite all the craziness, ultimately. No pressure.
I take comfort in the conversation I had with one of our professors, who said, "4th year doesn't have to be as stressful as people find it..." I'm not sure exactly how one goes about making it non-stressful, but the fact the bf is spending the summer off on his own special learning experience will definitely free up my time for rotations. I really slacked off on learning russian this last year, though, so it's going to be a tough time not talking with him--as part of his program, he is supposed to keep communication in any other languages to a minimum. I can still send him pictures, he can still write me letters (if they're in russian).
But in the meantime, I must figure out this zen thing. Hmmm, how to be zen while studying three years worth of material on top of daily lectures and clinics...
Monday, April 4, 2011
More time, please
Vet school really has done a number on my conception of myself as a good student. Now that we have one month left of lectures before we start clinics, it seems a little late to make any significant changes, but I still get very regretful on the nights before exams that I don't have a couple more days to show that I can study, I can be a good student, I just ran out of time. Unfortunately this trend has been going on for two years now, so the best I can do is pass the exams. Even if I study my butt off, at this point there's so much background information I'm trying to make up for that I realistically can't ace an exam. (I did try--I started studying three weeks ahead and attended all the lectures in a state of awakeness and so forth. I got 52 percent. On the other hand, the class average was 68 percent, and I had company down on my end of the curve, so I figure that particular exam was designed solely to crush our spirits.)
Being in a class full of overachievers doesn't help. ALL of them complain that they have not studied enough for the next exam. They then quiz each other on things that I am lucky if I remember from lecture, and which I haven't gotten around to reviewing yet. Really annoying when this happens five minutes before the exam.
Then there's meds. They screw with my concentration and my sleep schedule in maddeningly unpredictable ways. One day I'm fine with five hours of sleep, and the next day--although I may stay awake--I won't be able to recall a single thing from lecture aside from a vague sense that horses' joints came into it somewhere.
But part of it is really that I just don't spend enough time studying (unpredictable sleep schedule doesn't help, I will concede that much). Studying is like writing, I find--it won't get done if you don't sit down, and it's surprisingly hard sometimes. So It's especially frustrating when technology sabotages an hour of writing up notes by crashing the moment you try to save them. >.< Aargh. I already had one panic attack today, I refuse to have another one, plus my boyfriend told me he'll force me to e-mail the professor about not taking the exam tomorrow if I do. And even with a medical excuse, I don't see that going over well. Radiology exams involve lots of actual radiographs, which I suspect they don't want to put up and take down more than once.
At least I have the comfort that the act of creating questions was the point of the write-up. It would have been nice to go back and read through them (again, aargh), but realistically I would have run out of time anyway. So it's on to the next batch of write-ups, and this time remembering to save--if only as proof that yes, I studied!
Being in a class full of overachievers doesn't help. ALL of them complain that they have not studied enough for the next exam. They then quiz each other on things that I am lucky if I remember from lecture, and which I haven't gotten around to reviewing yet. Really annoying when this happens five minutes before the exam.
Then there's meds. They screw with my concentration and my sleep schedule in maddeningly unpredictable ways. One day I'm fine with five hours of sleep, and the next day--although I may stay awake--I won't be able to recall a single thing from lecture aside from a vague sense that horses' joints came into it somewhere.
But part of it is really that I just don't spend enough time studying (unpredictable sleep schedule doesn't help, I will concede that much). Studying is like writing, I find--it won't get done if you don't sit down, and it's surprisingly hard sometimes. So It's especially frustrating when technology sabotages an hour of writing up notes by crashing the moment you try to save them. >.< Aargh. I already had one panic attack today, I refuse to have another one, plus my boyfriend told me he'll force me to e-mail the professor about not taking the exam tomorrow if I do. And even with a medical excuse, I don't see that going over well. Radiology exams involve lots of actual radiographs, which I suspect they don't want to put up and take down more than once.
At least I have the comfort that the act of creating questions was the point of the write-up. It would have been nice to go back and read through them (again, aargh), but realistically I would have run out of time anyway. So it's on to the next batch of write-ups, and this time remembering to save--if only as proof that yes, I studied!
Monday, December 20, 2010
The eyes would have it
Except I was wiped out by the food animal exam and then grocery shopping turned into less of an outing and more of an endurance test than I had expected. Instead of going to the Great Big Grocery Store of Limitless Choices, I ended up at the local pricey-elitist food store instead. I put up with it because 1) they have some of the obscure food items I am now looking for, and 2) it's all of a quarter mile away. Which when the snow arrives is pretty handy. But it's still pricey. And I had been looking forward to seeing what Limitless Choices might have had. They might have had kefir! They might have had sugar-free-but-not-plain kefir! I really truly needed to go grocery shopping, though, because I have begun to run out food I can eat.
Background: my last little run-in with Crohn's made me realize I haven't been exploring all the options for treatment. If the medicine was working, I would be getting better, not going to the hospital the night before finals week. I rather foolishly assumed that my doctors knew what they were talking about when they said diet doesn't affect it. I now realize that this is a bit of a blind spot for Medicine. For some unfathomable reason, Medicine doesn't like the idea of diet having anything to do with health, except in a general "eat your vegetables" sort of way. I was told to go onto a low residue diet like a good little patient, whereupon I said, "but that's like what my boyfriend eats."
(My boyfriend, by choice, eats white bread, pasta with no sauce, and blueberry yogurt. Fortunately he does like quality beef, lamb, and zucchini brownies, so we still get along.)
The desperate search for dietary advice (is oatmeal okay? Blueberries? Ice cream?) led me over into the realm of macrobiotic diets (thank you, Google Books!). And while a little more research reveals a certain delusional quality that attends alternative diets (if you're supposed to eat seasonally and locally, and you happen to live in the middle of a continental landmass, explain to me again how Japanese seaweed is local?), there was also a hint of reason. Goodness knows refined sugar isn't natural in the quantities I enjoy it. It took me all of two days on liquid diet to get over the initial brooding about a life without cookies, and all of half a day on solid foods for me to discover a way to make cookies entirely with honey (it's not refined sucrose! Close enough!).
I got into a huff at my GI because she thought I was going to go holistic and quit my medications on her, just because I asked if she knew any nutritionists.
So, goals:
1. Find a dietitian who can tell me whether I'm allowed to eat oatmeal.
2. Find studies showing the effect of diet on Crohn's disease.
3. If there are no studies...well, I may have to reconsider my stance on not wanting to do research. I'm a vet student, not a med student, which decreases my ability to say "Time for a human study!" But there's so many people about my age with Crohn's, I can't believe there's NOT a way to gather some scientifically useful information about how diet affects it. New facebook group, anyone?
4. Cut refined sugar from my own diet, to start with.
Other possible foods to get the axe: dairy, wheat, possibly specific carbohydrates (but that's starting to get pretty extreme, when you cut rice--and chocolate!). I get the sense there's a true correlation between Crohn's and sugar, though. Funnily enough, it's one of the macrobiotic books claims that sugar acidifies the intestines that tipped the balance for me. I don't buy the pseudoscience, but there's sometimes deeper truths that Medicine hasn't gotten around to looking at because it *ahem* has its head up its bum.
The funny thing is that I had a professor last year whose ongoing research is the connection between Johne's and Crohn's. I'm trying to figure out a good way to ask him about his research. It just seems awkward to send him a random e-mail, though, saying, "So, after you gave that lecture about mycobacterium last year, it occurred to me I ought to check out my disturbingly recognizable symptoms, and heeey, guess what disease I am now becoming an expert in?"
Oh, but hey, I'm supposed to be taking a massive scary exam in ophthalmology tomorrow. My perspective is so skewed these days...even as I'm finding more and more compelling reasons to learn medicine really well, the relative value of grades becomes very distant and abstract. I shall study a bit, though, and hopefully I'll finish out the semester with passing grades even with all the road bumps along the way.
Background: my last little run-in with Crohn's made me realize I haven't been exploring all the options for treatment. If the medicine was working, I would be getting better, not going to the hospital the night before finals week. I rather foolishly assumed that my doctors knew what they were talking about when they said diet doesn't affect it. I now realize that this is a bit of a blind spot for Medicine. For some unfathomable reason, Medicine doesn't like the idea of diet having anything to do with health, except in a general "eat your vegetables" sort of way. I was told to go onto a low residue diet like a good little patient, whereupon I said, "but that's like what my boyfriend eats."
(My boyfriend, by choice, eats white bread, pasta with no sauce, and blueberry yogurt. Fortunately he does like quality beef, lamb, and zucchini brownies, so we still get along.)
The desperate search for dietary advice (is oatmeal okay? Blueberries? Ice cream?) led me over into the realm of macrobiotic diets (thank you, Google Books!). And while a little more research reveals a certain delusional quality that attends alternative diets (if you're supposed to eat seasonally and locally, and you happen to live in the middle of a continental landmass, explain to me again how Japanese seaweed is local?), there was also a hint of reason. Goodness knows refined sugar isn't natural in the quantities I enjoy it. It took me all of two days on liquid diet to get over the initial brooding about a life without cookies, and all of half a day on solid foods for me to discover a way to make cookies entirely with honey (it's not refined sucrose! Close enough!).
I got into a huff at my GI because she thought I was going to go holistic and quit my medications on her, just because I asked if she knew any nutritionists.
So, goals:
1. Find a dietitian who can tell me whether I'm allowed to eat oatmeal.
2. Find studies showing the effect of diet on Crohn's disease.
3. If there are no studies...well, I may have to reconsider my stance on not wanting to do research. I'm a vet student, not a med student, which decreases my ability to say "Time for a human study!" But there's so many people about my age with Crohn's, I can't believe there's NOT a way to gather some scientifically useful information about how diet affects it. New facebook group, anyone?
4. Cut refined sugar from my own diet, to start with.
Other possible foods to get the axe: dairy, wheat, possibly specific carbohydrates (but that's starting to get pretty extreme, when you cut rice--and chocolate!). I get the sense there's a true correlation between Crohn's and sugar, though. Funnily enough, it's one of the macrobiotic books claims that sugar acidifies the intestines that tipped the balance for me. I don't buy the pseudoscience, but there's sometimes deeper truths that Medicine hasn't gotten around to looking at because it *ahem* has its head up its bum.
The funny thing is that I had a professor last year whose ongoing research is the connection between Johne's and Crohn's. I'm trying to figure out a good way to ask him about his research. It just seems awkward to send him a random e-mail, though, saying, "So, after you gave that lecture about mycobacterium last year, it occurred to me I ought to check out my disturbingly recognizable symptoms, and heeey, guess what disease I am now becoming an expert in?"
Oh, but hey, I'm supposed to be taking a massive scary exam in ophthalmology tomorrow. My perspective is so skewed these days...even as I'm finding more and more compelling reasons to learn medicine really well, the relative value of grades becomes very distant and abstract. I shall study a bit, though, and hopefully I'll finish out the semester with passing grades even with all the road bumps along the way.
Monday, October 25, 2010
4th year what?
We had a 4th year planning meeting today to learn about all the wonderful intimidating aspects of setting up our 4th years rotations and externships. I think for most of us--definitely for me--there was an element of: "Wait, what? Shoot, I have to get on this! I'm not ready!" On the one hand, I want to excel! I want to be enthusiastic and personable and competent on every rotation I do (and I want to do them all). On the other hand, I know I'm going to be tired and frazzled and will want to just go home as soon as I can, so I worry that I'm going to completely FAIL to be enthusiastic and competent (and as for being personable, well, one can only do so much while trying to remember the medicine, the science, the animal-handling, and how that one person is a pain to work with but DON'T let them know that).
Oh, and I have an exam tomorrow. I did not realize this until this morning. Upon reflection, I probably would have spent a lot less time driving around doing errands this weekend had I known. And more time studying the prevention of mastitis in dairy cows.
Oh, and I have an exam tomorrow. I did not realize this until this morning. Upon reflection, I probably would have spent a lot less time driving around doing errands this weekend had I known. And more time studying the prevention of mastitis in dairy cows.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Too Hot
I need to get up a lot earlier if it's going to stay in the high 80's + humidity. Nine AM was obviously not early enough to be outside doing things. Granted, I think the mosquitos would have been happy to eat me at whatever hour I went outside, but at least I wouldn't have felt like I was wading through liquid warmth to boot. I have achieved one main thing today, and that was moving the roosters. They have been eating the tomatoes as the tomatoes got ripe, and when they chowed down on a golden jubilee I had had my eye on for three days, that was it. (They took a few bites out of every single other tomato that was within a day of ripening for good measure.)
Roosters are easy to catch if it is at night and you have a flashlight to shine in their eyes. They stare at the flashlight and, though suspicious that you might be doing something out of their sight, they don't panic until you have already caught them. Then they shriek bloody murder. We collected all 7 from their various roosts in the barn and sheds. They had to hang out in a dog crate all night, and of course the dogs had a splendid time running over to look in at the birdies, running away when we yelled "No chickens!" and back again as soon as the echo of our voices had died down and, to a dog's brain, had no more authority.
I drove the crate out to the other farm, and released the roosters onto the lawn. Only one of them bothered to check out the corn and water I'd put out for them. All the other roosters were interested only in getting as far away from each other as possible. Hopefully they'll make a couple of circuits and either find the water I put out or, ideally, figure out where the cows' waterers are and drink out of those.
Roosters are easy to catch if it is at night and you have a flashlight to shine in their eyes. They stare at the flashlight and, though suspicious that you might be doing something out of their sight, they don't panic until you have already caught them. Then they shriek bloody murder. We collected all 7 from their various roosts in the barn and sheds. They had to hang out in a dog crate all night, and of course the dogs had a splendid time running over to look in at the birdies, running away when we yelled "No chickens!" and back again as soon as the echo of our voices had died down and, to a dog's brain, had no more authority.
I drove the crate out to the other farm, and released the roosters onto the lawn. Only one of them bothered to check out the corn and water I'd put out for them. All the other roosters were interested only in getting as far away from each other as possible. Hopefully they'll make a couple of circuits and either find the water I put out or, ideally, figure out where the cows' waterers are and drink out of those.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Dog adoptions
This has been a summer remarkably free of veterinary medicine. I believe I had planned to be more enthused about inflicting my presence on local veterinarians, but between driving home every other day, gardening, and the trying to write on a daily basis, I've been remarkably busy. It takes about three hours of procrastination for me to get around to one hour of writing. This is an improvement over it taking three days to achieve the same level of frantic "must-write-NOW". At some point, I may achieve two hours of writing at a time. And that will be about the time school starts, at which point busyness truly descends with a vengeance.
In the meantime--I inadvertently talked my fiance into getting a greyhound. Not YET, but presumably we'll be picking a dog-friendly apartment for next year. I think it's Pye's fault. Pye is one of my dogs, very old but only recently starting to act like it (something about megaesophagus and retching all the time...). We adopted him when I was in middle school. He wasn't a mellow dog then, but the intervening years really reduced the running off/playbiting/barking all night. He now has just about enough energy to wander up and gaze imploringly at you. My fiance, who has never had dogs or cats, is a complete sucker for this sort of canine manipulation. And I may have mentioned, one time when I was trying to explain greyhound dispositions (from what I've seen--I admit I don't have a ton of experience with them), that they do this same sort of imploring gaze.
I'm hoping that adopting a greyhound goes smoother than adopting Pye went. I remember the local Humane Society, which I previously had considered a Good and Intelligent institution, really didn't want to let us adopt a dog from them. The problem? We live on a farm. The dog would be on a farm. The dog would be outside on the farm. Apparently, it is anathema to the humane society's mission to let any dog spend nights outside the warmth and protection of a house. If the dog came from a farm? Well, then it would be okay--unless the dog had become an indoor dog since its days on a farm. All dogs at the humane society are housed indoors. Ergo, all dogs from the humane society are indoor dogs. I think they finally let us have Pye because he had already come through the humane society twice (both times because he had way too much energy for living in a house), and they were getting desperate.
Talking with other people from farms (often vet students), this is pretty common. It doesn't matter how qualified the potential owner might be, the humane society would rather euthanize dogs than adopt them out to farms. Do they think the dogs are going to be unhappy on the farm? Do they envision horrible accidents involving combines? Do they think all outdoor dogs are abused dogs?
That said, greyhounds would not make good farm dogs. From what I know, they are capable of a little too much speed with not enough discretion for wire fences.
In the meantime--I inadvertently talked my fiance into getting a greyhound. Not YET, but presumably we'll be picking a dog-friendly apartment for next year. I think it's Pye's fault. Pye is one of my dogs, very old but only recently starting to act like it (something about megaesophagus and retching all the time...). We adopted him when I was in middle school. He wasn't a mellow dog then, but the intervening years really reduced the running off/playbiting/barking all night. He now has just about enough energy to wander up and gaze imploringly at you. My fiance, who has never had dogs or cats, is a complete sucker for this sort of canine manipulation. And I may have mentioned, one time when I was trying to explain greyhound dispositions (from what I've seen--I admit I don't have a ton of experience with them), that they do this same sort of imploring gaze.
I'm hoping that adopting a greyhound goes smoother than adopting Pye went. I remember the local Humane Society, which I previously had considered a Good and Intelligent institution, really didn't want to let us adopt a dog from them. The problem? We live on a farm. The dog would be on a farm. The dog would be outside on the farm. Apparently, it is anathema to the humane society's mission to let any dog spend nights outside the warmth and protection of a house. If the dog came from a farm? Well, then it would be okay--unless the dog had become an indoor dog since its days on a farm. All dogs at the humane society are housed indoors. Ergo, all dogs from the humane society are indoor dogs. I think they finally let us have Pye because he had already come through the humane society twice (both times because he had way too much energy for living in a house), and they were getting desperate.
Talking with other people from farms (often vet students), this is pretty common. It doesn't matter how qualified the potential owner might be, the humane society would rather euthanize dogs than adopt them out to farms. Do they think the dogs are going to be unhappy on the farm? Do they envision horrible accidents involving combines? Do they think all outdoor dogs are abused dogs?
That said, greyhounds would not make good farm dogs. From what I know, they are capable of a little too much speed with not enough discretion for wire fences.
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