Training does not have to equal train wreck

I am relieved to discover that after three days of full time work, I appear to have some idea of what I'm doing as a tech. Of course, now I've come down with a horrendously sore throat and still have the prospect of a two more eleven-hour work days this week, but hey, at least I have today off. The supervisor was terribly worried that I traded off an on-call shift three weeks from now, because how on earth will I get experience working in the OR? Aside from, y'know, the EXTRA DAY THIS WEEK that was the other part of the trade.

I was also glad to hear from my dad that, no, his clinic doesn't tell techs to "just dive in," and leave the training at that. They hire all certified techs, first of all, not random first year vet students, and they still have a very well defined training program the techs go through. 

One of my observations from work yesterday is that, as wonderfully effective as learning through (devastatingly bad) experience is, it means no one is sure what everyone else knows. We're just suppose to train ourselves so well we know everything. So we end up with things like an entire batch of medical equipment to resterilize, because one of the student techs didn't realize that the pointy ends were going to poke through the wrappers. It wasn't me! It was one of the "dive right in" proponents, ironically enough. 

Enough blathering for today. It's time for another dose of vitamin C and hot tea.

Rant

Summer...a time of relaxation and recuperation from a tough semester. Or not. I had been really really hoping I wouldn't get called in on Sunday, since I didn't realize until Friday afternoon that I was going to be on call, and I hadn't spent time learning to be a surgery tech since before exams. 

And let's face it, I never really got a good chunk of training any time over the semester. Pretty much ever since the second week after being hired I've known this was not what I wanted to do, though I'll blame it on the stunning lack of any training program for student surgery techs. How much training do real surgery techs get? I'm sure it's more than "whenever you have a spare moment to be in the clinic." Not to mention "Don't worry, you'll learn it on the job this summer."

Ideally I should have been smart enough to not sign up so quickly and willingly, or at least, in that second week, to have returned to the person who hired me and said, "Look, I didn't fully understand what the job entailed, I have significantly more time committed to labs for class than your other student workers, is there a way to work this out?"

Actually, truly ideally they would give you a chance to shadow someone for a full shift before even hiring, so that they get a student who wants to work there, rather than someone who has been told "It's such a terrific opportunity, it's really easy, all you have to do is [simple, minor time commitment]." And then have a trainee manual, which has all of the relevant information for the job (like, on which one of the multitude of calendars you are supposed to put your on-call contact info, and where to find keys for the supply room).  

What sparked this off was me getting called in on Sunday and being an incompetent idiot. I don't like being an incompetent idiot, even when another student charitably comes in and takes over. I didn't know even how to open the supply room to get the surgery supplies, so it was assumed I don't know how to set up for surgery. Throughout the surgery I found other ways to screw up. At least I knew how to clean the room afterward. Then we were called in again, an hour later, adding up to 8 hours of frustrated efforts to be competent.

Unfortunately I'm the sort of person who generally ascribes all problems to her own failings, so most of the semester I was thinking, "I just need to work harder, it's my fault I'm having so much trouble." Add in lack of people skills and confidence to use them (I've been working on that), which makes asking for help that much more difficult. So it was my own fault I didn't speak up to the (extremely unsympathetic) student in charge of scheduling, my own fault I didn't learn everything I needed to know on the job, and my own fault I was having so much trouble with classes that I was spending a lot of afternoons trying to keep up with school rather than learning how to do a job where I was told "Don't worry, you'll learn it this summer." Well, it turns out I am  learning it this summer, the hard way, inconveniencing other people and really stressing out myself.

As a communications major, it astonishes me that the OR of a well-respected clinic has such a dearth of training policy that an inept student remains inept for so long, and then is expected to know everything they need to when the learning of it is left entirely to chance and the assumed tenacity of the student. There is no manual to refer to, there is no effort made to introduce the student to the job. I did not know that veterinary surgery endorsed the discovery learning method.

Neuro = headache

It's cumulative, too. I spent two hours of studying this morning so freaked out I'm not sure I actually learned anything. There's too much material to just rewrite all my notes, my preferred way to study. So I ran errands and baked cookies (which didn't really quite work out, since I put them in a pan  and the middle didn't cook all the way through, but they're chocolate chip cookies which means it takes a lot more than that to make them inedible. Like, microwaving them and them turning into concrete afterwards. Hm, chewy.) 

Then, this afternoon...

Our wonderful wonderful professors gave us practice questions, a practice lab exam, and access to last year's exam, which when I looked at it caused me to freak out in the first place. But I started in on them anyway. It became obvious to me about five hours ago that nothing else was going to work. The practice questions were all about pinpointing damage to the spinal cord based on reflexes. Whether the dog kicks its leg, etc.

And, it has given me a headache (actually, it was probably the cookies, but ignore that!). I don't usually get headaches. But today it feels like my entire right temporal lobe fell down and bruised itself, with the left lobe cutting in now and then out of sympathy. So more study time down the drain while I hid under blankets, waiting for it to go away. The headache or the neuroanatomy exam, I'm not sure which. 

Thankfully there's a nice stretch of morning before the exam, so I'm going to go study until I fall asleep around midnight. By some miracle the information will all find a place to sit and I will discover I know it all when I start reviewing again tomorrow. 

That's my little pep talk for myself.

P.S. Do you realize the trees are blooming right now? I used to spend lots of time outside, keeping track of things like that. But this time spring went right over my head. It's going to be summer before I have a chance to adapt to temperatures being above 50! I can't even imagine how I'm going to adapt to physical labor again, but I have to if I want tomatoes in unending profusion. Plus the other stuff that grows in the garden, but, y'know, the tomatoes are the important part.

High time for cookies

Large animal anatomy today.

Sometimes you get these exams where you don't know the answers. It's not that you don't know the material. You just spent the last fifteen waking hours maneuvering a textbook's amount of it into your cranium, to say nothing of all the labs since January. But when you look at the pin sticking into the artery, nothing helpful like "Oh, that's the cranial tibial artery," leaps into your head. It's not that you look at it and have no clue. For instance, it's definitely sitting right next to the muscle called the cranial tibial, but wait, is that the cranial tibial artery? Or is this particular artery actually called something else? 

So you just fill out the answers with words that make sense, and hope your brain knew more about what was going on than you did. And then you go home and make cookies. Because with another three days of this sort of thing, cookies are the best defense against going totally bonkers.

Mmm. Now, for the nutrition exam tomorrow...

 

Getting sick just in time for finals

But I swear, it's not swine flu. For one thing, it started before the frantic media did, and secondly, it's pretty much staying at the sore throat and feeling lousy level. For once I actually studied for the majority of the time I was awake, this weekend. Sleep, wake up and study, sleep. As for my favorite recreational activity, grocery shopping...there seems to be no point when all your dietary needs are being met by chicken bouillion cubes and cough drops. The biggest question is whether I'm going to beg off palpating live cows and horses this afternoon. More sleep would be sooo nice.

Exam run-down:
Today was reproductive phys, which was challenging mostly because we have no old exams to look at. The multiple choice q's start out with a complicated set up and then want a fairly nuanced answer, like just how exactly a hormonal supplement is going to affect the a)sperm production b) testosterone c)hyp-pit axis... of a cryptorchid. I think that may have been the worst of it, actually. Although it always worries me when I end up with five b's or c's in a row on the bubble sheet.

Then in two days comes Biochem, scary mainly because it is biochem. That's everything for this week, thankfully. On the other hand, that means Neuro, Anatomy, Radiology, and nutrition are all somehow going to be next week. Anatomy would be most terrifying, except I have spent so much time in lab that I've reached that blissful stage where even arteries and nerves start looking familiar. Instead of "I think that might possibly be the femoral artery but I can't totally be sure because there's so many other whitish tubules in this section," it's more: "Yeah, that looks like a femoral artery. Next!"

Of course, some study is in order. There are, after all, a LOT of whitish tubules in the hindlimb.

Spelling bee--finally, my chance to shine!

Yep, it was a tough contest today. It was between the first years, the second years, and the third years. The words flew through the air with all the speed and agility of parrots (i.e. not all that speedy or agile), but gaffes were few and far  between.  There was one notable exception--"g-h-a-r-i-f-e"? I suspect she might just not have wanted to spell giraffe. 

The third years, whose brains have been subject to three years of vet school and thus are understandably a bit shaky when it comes to something as pedestrian as spelling, fell out first. The first years were definitely in the lead. We still had three out of four from our group, whereas the other two classes had only one student hanging on. There was a tricky moment with 'metzenbaum', which I can spell but not identify (some sort of scissor?). A few more times back and forth (dachshund would have stumped me, but fortunately it went to someone else) and then the last second year mistook a letter. I can't actually remember what the word was, but something like pterygoid or metacarpophalangeal. 

Er. 

Um. 

This is awkward.

But anyway,  I spelled it! And then 'erythropoiesis' was the challenge word, which went fine. Hurrah. 

So now that I've proved I can be my own spell checker, I can go back to studying for exams where everything is multiple choice. 

Repro and biochem, here I come!

Parrots and Ferrets

Monday was random animals day! Also known as physical exam of exotics...they presented us with tortoises (tortoise restraint: hold the shell). 
Snakes: one student got hold of the python and wouldn't let it go...or maybe vice versa.
Rabbits: if it grinds its teeth that means it likes you? 
Ferrets: What a charming carnivore. I'm glad I don't have one. 
Parrots: cra!-cra!-cra!-cra! for FORTY minutes. My new least favorite animal in the world. 

Then we have Wednesday, formaldehyde day. Our pony cadaver has dwindled to a single leg dangling from the ceiling, though it took a lot of work to get there. Dissection is the art of finding the really delicate bundle of nerves before you cut it...and then cutting it and moving on.