Midway through Midterms

Well, almost. The joke now is that halfway through our Animal Production Systems midterm, we're all going to give a little cheer for being officially halfway done this horrible stretch of seven midterms.

Anatomy was a bit annoying. I feel like I didn't get a chance to show what I really knew. I missed a few dumb multiple choice on the written. The practical was definitely better than the written, surprisingly. The annoying part was that I know the nerves. I'm good at nerves. But the dogs they chose... I couldn't seem to make heads or tails of where those nerves were going or what they were doing. As ridiculous as it sounds, I think I got my 65%, that's all I care about. I knew anatomy wouldn't be my best subject in vet school, and it's not worth freaking out about. Vet school is weird, in that it takes a bunch of type-A overacheivers and makes them perfectly happy to just pass.

Immunology was much better, surprisingly! I feel like I have the potential to actually do well in immunology. The questions were more general then I was expecting. There were a few times that I probably gave too much information. Mostly out of a sense of "I bothered to remember this, so YOU'RE GOING TO READ IT, DAMNIT!"

CSI: Avian

This morning was an avian necropsy and bandaging wetlab (bandaging was done on the dead birds we were using for necropsy). I did (apparently) a great job wrapping the wing, but broke the ulna trying to place an interosseus catheter. :oops:  In my defence though, the doctor in charge said that the ulna was very tiny in the bird I had and I probably wouldn't be able to place it, even with a 25 gauge needle (the smallest size they had on hand). My bird wasn't in particularly good condition - they were all donations, and they're usually frozen prior to use, so sometimes the tissues aren't in great shape. Mine was pretty bad. But! I did find something interesting. There was quite a large divet in the heart and bruising on the pectoral muscles in the same location which the pathologist on hand indicated might be evidence of a shooting injury.  (Those are my CSI Horatio sunglasses.)

Now my hair smells like cow

My hair, and my clothes, and most of me, actually. Today was more or less Cow Day for me. It started with a tour of an excellent dairy farm full of happy cows. Happy, friendly cows. It was a free-stall barn, and we were smack in the middle of it. One very large cow was especially friendly and did a fantastic job of upstaging the professor. As they say: Never work with children or animals! Or to be really upstaged, work with young animals. There were calves. They were adorable. One in particular adopted my friend as it's mother and spent the entire time trying to get milk out of her elbow. I give him full points for effort!

It finished with a wetlab on physical exams on cows using the teaching cows at the college. I'm a horse person, so large animals don't frighten me, but cows are not horses. They share some behavioural traits, but not enough that I felt comfortable around them. I'm much better now though! We did rectal temperatures, heart/lung auscultation, general health check (noting skin lesions, udder health, CRT, mucus membranes, etc), rumen/intestinal sounds. Finally a chance to use my stethoscope. I love cows.

In between the cows, I wrote my first vet school exam. Structure and Function was today. Two hours to diagnose a case (well, they more or less gave us the diagnosis) and trace all the clinical signs and symptoms back to the cause. I think I did pretty well. I'm not sure if I took some mechanisms down to enough detail, but I think I'll come out with a decent mark.

One down, six to go! Anatomy on Monday. Surprisingly feeling okay about that. Terrified of histology though!

Thanksgiving weekend!

Hurrah, I'm back in Nova Scotia at my dad's house for two and a half days. It's going to go entirely too fast. I should probably be studying while I'm home, but not sure I can bring myself to do it.

Midterms sort of start this coming week, but not really. Our first midterm is Structure and Function, but the way it's set up, we can't really study for it. After that, we start with anatomy on Oct 17 and basically have one midterm every second day after that until the 28. Eek!!

Rounds are still awesome. I'm a big picture learner, and it's really great for pulling information together. Thanks to cardiology rounds with Dr Cote, I correctly identified premature ventricular contraction on an ECG in physiology. By the way, I love physiology for the time being. The heart is just amazing. Anatomically, too. It's just such an elegant, perfect design for what it does. And in pathology, we saw lungs from a lamb with pulmonary edema - the trachea was all filled with foam!

"Does my hair smell like cows??"

You learn to not be surprised by anything that happens in vet school. Half the class toured a dairy farm this morning. I wasn't on it, I missed the sign-up sheet, so I'll go next week. Just as well, since I'm in a group that has a presentation to give on Friday that's 30% of our grade for that class and it was nice to have the morning to work on it. Never mind the fact that PEI has apparently decided to have a monsoon season. Yikes! Torrential rain and horrific north wind at 100kph. I got more or less soaked in the 10 minutes it took for me to walk from my house to the UPEI library.

As I sat doing research reading an article from 1969 on aging in adult dog bones, a classmate scurries over, sticks her head immediately in front of my face and asks, "Does my hair smell like cows??" Not: "Hi, how are you? I think my hair smells like cow..." Just flat out: "Does my hair smell like cows??" And that was more or less the end of that conversation too.

Luckily, said classmate is a very good friend and has a very distinct voice. Otherwise I think my reaction to a girl sticking her head in my face would have been to slap her. Instead, it was the funniest thing I've seen all week. I'm still laughing about it.

Maybe you had to be there though.

(And yes, her hair did smell like cows. Not that it bothered me."

This afternoon

I spent way too much time cleaning dried blood and neon-pink latex out of the heart of our cadaver.

I feel like that should be all I need to write for this post. Somehow, once you bring up the words "dried blood" and "neon-pink latex" (especially when brought up consecutively), nothing else seems to matter.

Midterms on the horizon now! Bugger bugger bugger. This is one of those things I don't like about AVC. A lot of vet schools have numerous tests and quizzes throughout the semester. At AVC, our marks are almost entirely test based. And we have two sets of tests - midterms in mid- to late-October, and finals in early- to mid-December. I vastly prefer more frequent but smaller tests to infrequent large ones. So I'm sitting here in the cafeteria, rewriting my notes on sheep and cow-calf operations. I dislike studying for Animal Production Systems. I love the material, don't get me wrong! But whenever I study for it, I feel like I'm wasting my time because so much of it is common sense for someone who grew up rural surrounded by 4H and farms. But I have no idea what we'll be asked on the midterm, so here I sit.

Pig roast was Saturday night. Fantastic food! There's nothing quite like pig cooked slow on a spit. It's why I can't be a vegetarian. Meat just tastes too good! Vet school has actually reaffrimed my omnivorous ways though. We go to farms. The animals are, by and large, happy. Ideal? No. But they're happy. They're clean. They're well looked after. So I make an effort to buy local so I know I'm getting the ones that were happy, and maybe one day I'll end up as a production/food animal vet making sure that all of them are happy.

Vet Med: The Academic Buffet

I have classmates who are dead set on one field or another, to the point that they don't investigate other fields.

Me? I like to sample from the buffet of veterinary medicine. This weekend I'm attending the Dairy Cattle Lameness conference at the Animal Welfare Centre. On Thursday, it was cardiology rounds at lunch and gross pathology rounds in the afternoon (mouldy bird air sacs!). Wednesday, it was clinical pathology rounds.

I'm reasonably certain I want to do something with infectious diseases, or public health, or epidemiology. I love microbiology. And I won't lie: it doesn't hurt that it tends to be one of the more lucrative careers in vet med. I thought I'd be in a lab somewhere working for the CFIA, maybe. Or maybe zoonotic diseases. Who knows?

Today, I stuck my name in for a possible summer position in aquaculture. Aquaculture! Admittedly, I'm still not the biggest fan of fish (except for pretty koi in decorative ponds, or a greasy plate of fish and chips) but most of aquaculture is dealing with infection control and epidemiology. Right up my alley!

The conference is very promising so far. Dr Weary from UBC is speaking. He gave a lecture today on scientific analysis of pain control for us first years, as well as a dairy cattle specific lecture this evening to kick off the conference. Fantastic speaker! Very articulate and entertaining. If you ever get a chance to see him speak, I encourage you to cease it.