A Midsummer Night's Check-In

Yes, just poking my head in here. Expect more regular updates after August 27 when second year officially starts.

Until then, I just want to touch on the physical aspect of this career path. You will get injured. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Animals are unpredictable. In addition to that, most medical procedures are at least partially uncomfortable. Your patients don't understand that you need that blood sample to diagnose them to make them feel better. They just know that you're holding them down and something just stabbed them. Sometimes, the blood drawn isn't theirs, it's yours.

Which brings me to my latest scar in the making. A run in with a goat at work resulted in my glasses frame being pushed into my right eyebrow. Result? A 4cm-ish long gash, needing five stitches and a broken lens.

Being the vet student that I am, I was mostly peeved that I couldn't watch the emergency doctor doing the sutures. No worse for wear though! I may have a scar, I may not, that remains to be seen. Luckily, vet med is the one industry where "I got this scar being in the face by a goat" is considered impressive. To the rest of the world, it's just weird.

On hiatus!

*blows cobwebs away*

Just so you don't stumble on to this blog and think it's been abandoned. My Four Years and Counting will be on hiatus until sometime in mid-August as I'm getting ready for second year. After all, it's a bit hard to blog about vet school when you're not in vet school. To all the accepted internationals in the Class of 2016, I can't wait to meet you! And Canadians, stalk your mail carrier because letters are going out this week!

So I'll leave you with some interesting lobster colour genetics, and in the words of Tigger: "TTFN! Ta ta for now!"

Will rare blue lobster give birth to blue babies?

Epilogue to Year 1

So, I've survived - yes, I'm sure my absence indicated exams had driven me to run off and join the circus; they did, but I'm a lousy acrobat, so I came home.

I got through exams and came out the other side relatively unscathed, if tired. Marks came in a week or so ago and it's all good news, so I can't complain there!

I had almost two weeks off, and I started my first of two summer jobs today. I'm running some lab work for a PhD student at school. Nothing glamorous, but it's much needed paid lab experience that I'm more than grateful to have. I'll be with her until the end of June, then I'm acting as a camp counsellor at some animal themed day camps for July and August.

Today, I had sort of a weird revelation. I was following the PhD candidate around, observing how she went about her research, asking lots of questions (she's very patient with me, luckily). It struck me - I was a minarai.

I've long been entranced by the karyukai - the flower and willow world of geisha. There's sort of four stages to a geisha's training. Shikomi, minarai, maiko and geisha.

Shikomi (仕込み) are the errand runners. They don't entertain, they don't get dressed up. They learn, they clean, they cook, they practice. Shikomi are pre-vets. The word "shikomi" translates as "preparation".

Minarai (見習い) are first stage apprentices. They atten parties, but they don't do much. Their goal is to watch and learn. Vet students in years 1-3 are minarai. We pay attention and if we're really lucky, we learn something.

Maiko (舞妓) literally translates as "dancing child". These are the fourth years. They're starting to entertain (see clients, treat patients), but they're nervous, they're inexperienced. Real maiko wear bright, almost garish kimono and hair ornaments to cover up the fact that they might be a bit clumsy. Senior vet students hide behind their lab coats, their stethoscopes, and will happily talk your ear off about what they do know in hopes that it covers up what they don't know*. I could probably lump new graduates and interns in here too.

Geiko (芸子）is the veterinarian with a few years under their belt. The geiko is refined, elegant. They don't need the flashy clothes and jargon. They may wear a white coat, or scrubs, or jeans. It doesn't matter, they know what they're talking about. They just go about their business, confident in their abilities.

So there you have it. That's what exams does to you. It makes you draw really weird comparisons. Someone reset my brain please?


*Okay, to be fair, all vet students sort of do that. Including yours truly. "Well I don't know much about x, but here's everything I know that's even vaguely related to x!" It's a bad exam habit I have.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...

Okay, so I'm putting off studying for my FINAL EXAM OF FIRST YEAR (yeah, I needed to write that in capitals). I ordered a hoodie, since my class was selling printed and embroidered clothes as a fundraiser. After all, only natural to want to show off your school and what you do, right? Especially when you worked this hard to get it.

I ordered a red hoodie, with the veterinary medicine logo on the front, and "Real doctors treat more than one species" on the back. Logos on the front of things typically go on the left chest, right? So I figured all I needed to write on the order form was "front".

I was mistaken.

I got exactly what I ordered.

Oh well. I kind of like the superhero-esque effect.

No middle ground

That basically describes how I feel while studying. All day, I've been reviewing off and on for my anatomy final (!!!) on Monday. My confidence level in the material seems to pendulum. I vary between "Hey, I got this! External iliac, semitendinosus, hyopharyngeus! Yessiree-bob (okay, no I don't say "yessiree-bob") I'm gonna ace this!" and "OMGWTFBBQ!! What is this stuff?!?! "Femoropatellar joint pouch"?! What the hell is that!? No one's ever mentioned that before!! WAHHHH! I'M GONNA FAIL AND HAVE TO WORK RETAIL FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!!"

Okay, that last part is kind of hyperbole, but you get the picture. I have no "Yeah, I'll be okay" setting. I mean, I do. I know logically if I'm swinging wildly between those two settings, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Past experience has shown me that if I put in the time (which I have) I'll be all right.

It doesn't help that I've got a nagging headache. I'm heading to bed early tonight (as soon as the Sens/Rangers game is over) in the hopes of making it go away. In my headache/tired/drug induced brain fog, I misread my notes today, and the cranial nerves of "sensation" suddenly became the cranial nerves that were "sensational". I don't remember which nerves those are now, but they must be marvelous! (I have a mental block with the cranial nerves in that I have to go down the various dirty mnemonic devices to figure out which is which and what they do.)

Just 13 more days!

Verified: Competent

Today I had the first of nine exams that I'll write over the next 17 days. It was for Clinical Orientation - we have to show what we know so they call it a verification of competence. How to use various pieces of equipment, how to restrain animals for different procedures, identification of ages, breeds, sexes, etc. I breezed through the large animal written section and bovine handling and restraint (including getting one hand full of you-know-what while demonstrating a tail jack). And then I came to small ruminant and swine. I did okay with the sheep. They mostly just stood in a corner and were more or less cooperative.

But swine... Oh dear. I'm not comfortable with pigs. I respect them as highly intelligent animals and they're cute as hell as babies. But I'm really only comfortable with swine when they're on my plate. So I put on my big girl rubber boots and in I go with the two 3 month old pigs as the doctor watches me. First, I almost left the gate open, because it looked like the doctor was going to close it (she was reaching for it), but she didn't, and pointed it out to me. I grab the pig board and guide the smaller pig into a corner to show I know how to use it. She asks me where to make an IM injection and I show her. She hands me a hog snare and asks me how to use it (I don't actually have to demonstrate on the pig). Meanwhile, the big pig is CHEWING ON MY LAB COAT. And my boots. And at one point, my legs. Do you have any idea how hard it is to seem composed and intelligent while you're being chewed on by a pig?? I swear that was the longest 3 minutes of my life. I was ecstatic to finally get to the equine station.It was like being rescued by my comrades after being stuck behind enemy lines.

We did small animal next. I came across like an idiot for lab animal. I know the material for lab animal, I can perform the skills, but she mostly wanted me to explain it, and I'm not so good at verbalizing this stuff. Everything else went smoothly. I passed small animal, and as far as I know, I passed large animal. So I'm officially verified as competent. Woo. Just eight more exams to go!

People always complain about anatomy

First year students seem to ubiquitously complain about anatomy. I don't get it, personally. It's just a bunch of names, but there's nothing tricky about anatomy. It's a lot of material, but it's basically straight memorization. If you know any Latin and Greek word roots, you can usually make some sense of the names too. Plus there's all the dirty acronyms for nerves and blood vessels. And dissection is just, well, it's fun. For a given value of fun, mind you. I kind of like it. I have a solid group to work with and we laugh and joke (especially when we're doing the reproductive system....). Anyway, my point is that the people that complain about anatomy have it all wrong. They're wasting their time.

What they need to be complaining about is embryology.

Good lord. All I can say is that I've never had a class suck the life out of me the way embryology does. We had the midterm today, and we're all just praying we passed. I don't know, maybe at other vet schools, embryology isn't as bad. I swear if everyone had to pass an embryology class before being allowed to procreate, we'd have world overpopulation solved. After the test, you could look at my class and truthfully wonder if you'd stumbled onto the set of some zombie movie. Angry zombies ranting about "Who cares where the thyroid cells originate from!?" mind you, but zombies nonetheless.

I've mostly gotten through first year thinking, "Well this isn't too bad..." But embryology? Woo, boy, they saved the best for last, obviously. Just in case you get cocky thinking you can cruise your way into second year. To reference hockey, I feel like I almost had a win, then the other team tied it up late in the third and now we have to go to overtime.