Hell week

So, we wrote 4 midterms in a week this week. Anesthesia, Medicine, Clinical Pathology and Surgery. We're all pretty haggard, and exhausted. We're still technically in the Midterm Madness - one next week, one the week after and one the week after that. But one per week is practically a vacation after running the gauntlet like we did this week.

I'll flatly admit it - I don't like surgery. I don't really have any interest it, and it barely registers a blip on my radar. When it does register, my brain tends to go into a meltdown something to the effect of: HOLY SHIT! I AM GOING TO HAVE TO DO SURGERY IN SEPTEMBER! I AM GOING TO CUT OPEN A LIVING CREATURE, TAKE STUFF OUT AND CLOSE IT UP AND THE ANIMAL IS GOING TO LIVE!!! And then my conscious brain runs away screaming leaving my subconscious brain to watch Doctor Who clips on YouTube. It's a self-protective mechanism. Like a fugue state, but with more timey-wimey.

In fact, I'm something of an anomaly in that I felt way more confident going into the Clinical Pathology midterm than the Surgery midterm. Clinical Pathology is all about reading bloodwork. There's rules, and if you apply the rules and do a bit of problem solving, you get something approaching a diagnosis. I love this shit. I loved going over CBCs* and serum biochemistry reports when I worked in a clinic. The vets would look at a sheet of numbers and declare a diagnosis and I'd be jumping up and down like a Chihuahua on coffee trying to get them to explain it to me.

But surgery... Well at this point, we're just learning lists of stuff. Types of suture material. Suture patterns. Rules of asepsis. Methods of sterilization for equipment. Don't get me wrong, it's important stuff. It just doesn't interest me all that much. So needless to say, studying for it was a bit painful. Luckily, it's over, and it's not a cumulative final. It actually wasn't bad.

Anesthesia killed me last week. Everything I thought I knew about induction drugs? Yeah, she asked everything else. I'm hoping I redeemed myself on the "diagram and explain" type questions about breathing circuits and equipment. My vaporizer diagram was like the work of an artist. Assuming that artist was Picasso in his later stages, so that it kind of looked like a vaporizer if you tilted your head and squinted. But I labelled everything right and explained how it worked, and that's the important bit right? I'm in vet school, not art school!

*That's complete blood count, not Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; though I do love Hockey Night In Canada.