Muscle of Inspiration

Sounds weird, right?

Yes, it did to me too, when I read it in anatomy lab. The scalenus is a muscle of inspiration. Er, well, it's a very nice muscle, but I'm not sure I really feel particularly inspired by it. My lab partners and I had a little laugh over it and then went on. The next muscle on the list was the serratus dorsalis cranialis. But this time, the wording was different. Something to the effect of "this muscle aids in inspiration".

Lightbulb turned on.

Ohhhh. Inspiration as in inhalation.


Bugger. That was dumb of me.

AVC Open House!

Yes, once a year the vet college throws open its doors to let the public see the parts of the hospital beyond the exam rooms. This is a massive undertaking. I think just about every single student and staff member helps out in some capacity. I was in radiology, explaining (to the best of my feeble first year abilities) radiographs to parents, kids and prospective students. I had a lovely chat (in between rushes of people) with a girl who wanted to know more about getting in to vet school.

I think the most common question I got was: "Are these pictures of dinosaurs?" Admittedly, having been a dinosaur-crazy kid at one point, it was actually a little heartbreaking to tell them no, they weren't. I wanted to point out that birds are sort of dinosaurs, but didn't think launching into the evolutionary history of avians was a good idea with a bunch of 7 year olds. Besides, after the eighth time a kid calls a radiograph of a crow a pterodactyl...

The parents had more trouble with the rads of the birds then the kids did though. At least the kids got it in the realm of "has two wings and flies". I had multiple parents though proudly point to the birds and proclaim, "Look sweetheart, it's a frog!" Yes, ma'am. That's the elusive Amazonian Long-Necked Beaked Frog. With Wings. 

Finally! Gross pathology rounds!

(And that isn't "gross" as in yucky, it's "gross" as in macroscopic or visible to the naked eye. Although some people would tell you that the first definition is just as appropriate.)

They're supposed to be every Thursday at 4:30, but sometimes, they just don't happen. I finally got to attend a session today though. The fourth years and the doctors present interesting cases that have come in for pathological analysis. To the unitiated, this is basically just looking at bloody bits of dead animal. And since I'm still woefully undereducated, that's what it seems like to me too. But I'm learning! Some cases are more interesting than others. Rabbit with a uterus full of cancer? Eh, pass. Goat brain with polioencephalomalacia that causes the brain to fluoresce under UV light?? Yes please! No one knows why it causes the brain to do this - there's theories that it might be related to break down of lipids, but nothing has been proven. You can see an example here: Polioencephalomalacia of ruminants

A day in the life

So, exactly what does a day in the life of a first year vet student look like?

This is a typical weekday for me:
7:00 - Wake up, shower, eat breakfast, collect various food for the day to take to school.
8:00 - Start job. Sort laundry, drop off for the service to pick up.
8:30 - Classes start. Class schedule varies by day.
12:30 - Lunch time. Depending on the day, I'm either working in the laundry room again (as I am now) or I'm attending club meetings.
1:30 - Classes (again).
4:30 - Classes end for the day. Find somewhere quiet to study or run errands or sometimes, there's extracurriculars (like Thursday is gross pathology rounds abd Fridays are physiology tutorials.
6:30 - Head to the gym.
7:30 - Leave the gym, come home, shower, eat supper.
8:30 - Study.
10:30 - Quit studying for the night, watch Doctor Who/Torchwood/anime/Daily Show/Colbert Report/Conan - depending on what strikes my fancy. Call parents/people back home.
12:30 - Bed.

Get up the next morning and do it all again! Weekends are usually tutorials, social events, extra curriculars (and sleep). And inevitiably, I end up spending almost as much time on weekends at school as I do on weekdays.

And now, a musical interlude

From our fellow prisoners (I mean, colleagues) at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. I give you... DYNAVET! Huge applause to these guys, this is just freaking awesome.

I had good intentions

So we didn't have class this morning. I was all prepared to pop into the anatomy lab and review some muscles and tendons and insertions. My body had distinct other ideas. Yeah, I gave in and rolled over and went back to sleep. I was dead tired. In my defense, I'm going on Saturday after the Histology tutorial. And next Tuesday is Anatomy jeopardy and I will be going to that!

Unfortunately, I missed clinical pathology rounds today. I had a doctor's appointment that ran long, so my options were eat lunch or go to rounds and well... Pizza won. What can I say? I'm weak. I will be hitting up gross pathology rounds after Anatomy lab tomorrow though! I like the clinical aspect, even though I don't want to be a clinician. But I'm a problem solver by nature, so seeing Antomy, Physiology, Histology, Immunology, etc integrated into real world cases is really helpful.

It's probably why I like Integration of Structure and Function (or Struck and Fuck, as my buddy called it in her notes...). That class is both exhilirating and mentally exhausting. It's okay, up until you get to the flow chart. We have to take each sign/symptom and draw them back through the anatomical and physiological mechanisms that caused them, tracing them back to the ultimate diagnosis. Unfortunately, we don't always know what we're doing. We're learning, but it's a lot to take in. A lot of consultation with Drs Google and Wikipedia (though I do not condone using them to diagnose in every day life, especially when used by people with no medical background at all). For example, we'll know that the spleen is involved in red blood cell recycling, but not quite HOW (because we haven't learned yet!). Our professors rightfully say we look panic stricken. Of course, panic stricken is how I'm approaching most of vet school. Most days I'm reminded of the saying, "If you can remain calm while everyone around you is losing their head, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation."

In other news, I have a job! The Society for Atlantic Veterinary Students runs a laundry service. Students drop off dirty/smelly scrubs, coveralls and lab coats and they get sent out and washed and returned. They hire two students to staff the office for 5-6 hours a week and handle intake and handing out of clean clothes. I applied and got it! Not much, but it's easy to work around my schedule (mostly just means giving up part of lunch time and getting to school a half hour earlier or something) and it'll cover my grocery bills and then some. Plus it looks good on resumes and scholarship applications!

There's an old joke

It's a one-liner stating: The number one cause of death is living.

Sometimes, vet med feels that way. Especially as a new student without a lot of working knowledge. As vet students, we come in with some basic science and whatever practical knowledge we scraped up in our work experience and volunteering. So especially during this first year, sometimes, it feels like we're fumbling around in the dark.

The course that's supposed to teach us to think like clinicians is Structure and Function. We're given hypothetical cases (based on real cases) and slowly given the information needed to work through them. The format is thus:
1) Basic pieces of data.
2) Record data.
3) Record known problems - what body systems are involved and what might be affecting them (infection, trauma, degeneration, etc)?
4) What further testing and information is needed?
We get more information, add the new data in with the old, and then we can start eliminating things off our initial list of hypothesis. Now, this is problem solving, and I love it. What I don't love is when your initial list of problems consists of nothing but "lethargy" and "inappetance", as it did with this week's case. Do you have ANY idea how frigging long the list of possible causes for "lethargy" and "inappetance" is?? It goes on forever! It more or less includes everything that could ever possibly go wrong.

Eventually, it was immune-mediated hemolytic anemia. We think. No one's confirmed it for us, but after getting CBC values and a decent physical exam, that's what we came up with. My point, dear reader, is that your vet is not magical. When they say they need to run Test X, they mean it. There's a lot of symptoms that present with a lot of diseases. It's really hard to tell them apart with vague symptoms though.