Happy Halloween!

All I'm going to say is that vet school students certainly know how to party it up.  The Halloween party on Saturday night was sooooo much fun!  There must have been about 200 of us there, and the costumes were fantastic!  Some of the best were a group of Jetsons characters, Paul Bunyan and Babe the ox, a goldfish, car insurance characters (Flo, the Gecko, etc.), Avatar, and the Ninja Turtles.  There was definitely a lot of creativity and thought put into everyone's costumes, and it was sooooo much fun to hang out with people from school without a single thought given to schoolwork. 

Yesterday I got some studying done in the morning and was actually somewhat productive.  Go me!  Last night I made the drive over to Carrboro to visit with a Penn State friend who is down here now to study architecture and planning at UNC.  She had a few of her program friends over as well, so I got to hear a bit about how their program works, their classes, and their fellow classmates.  It's funny how similar their conversations are to those within the vet school.  Seems like students in advanced programs everywhere have the same sort of experiences no matter what they're studying!

In on a Friday!

It's finally starting to feel more like fall here in Raleigh - got to spend the morning outside in the cool air wrangling some beef cattle for my last TAU course of the semester.  Our group did some basic herding and handling, and we all practiced using a head chute.  The clinician and a few older students did pregnancy checks for each of the cows, so it was pretty cool to feel like our work was actually helping in some way.

Today we had our first quiz after break - histology - and I think it went pretty well for us as a class.  Since the last exam we've been going through organs and organ systems and doing identification work for each.  This quiz covered the GI tract and some of the accessory organs (liver, pancreas, gall bladder), and we started some work on the eye today.  Pretty cool stuff!  It's amazing to see how everything in your body fits together so well to do everything it needs to.

Anatomy has been kind of a pain since the last exam.  We've started in with all of the head and cranial stuff, and geez - there is a LOT to learn!  I have one of our group's dog skulls sitting on my table now, and I think I'll be practicing the skull bones and parts tonight.  We spent this week doing the dissection of the bones, muscles, mouth, eye, nose, etc., and we start right in with the cranial nerves on Monday, which is supposed to be the beastliest part of the course.  I think that's the case in just about any vet school for some reason!  Since we're dealing with such a small part of the anatomy (literally JUST the head itself), you can imagine that every nerve, blood vessel, muscle, fossa, and foramen is just as tiny.  I can't help but feel like I'm blatantly missing a lot of things during our lab period, which could be a problem come exam-time.  Plus our group is working on the cat right now, which doesn't help the whole visualization thing at all - thank goodness we switch cadavers in a few days!

In both good and bad news, we only have 2 1/2 weeks of class left before our finals week starts.  Pretty cool that the first semester is almost finished but pretty scary that I'm expected to be ready for a half dozen exams in that amount of time.  Eeep.  Gotta get cracking!

Buuuuut this weekend does hold some quality distractions in store.  Tomorrow morning I get to head back into school for Saturday necropsy!  It's the first one I signed up for, and I'm pretty excited to see gross dissection of some pathologies.  Getting my car inspected right after, and tomorrow night is the annual vet school Halloween party.  Every year I promise myself I'll start planning an awesome costume really early and every year I fail.  So I'm re-using my Hermione Granger costume again this year.  I already have all the parts, it's comfy, and I can decently pull it off.  Works for me!

Gotta start being productive between all of that stuff because the boy is coming up for a visit next weekend, and I don't get nearly as much done when he's here.  I think I have some pretty good ideas of things to do while he's here, which I'm not sharing in case he's reading this!  His birthday is coming up soon, and I feel like there's not many things I can get for him, so I'll treat him to a few fun days instead.

Three more weeks (give or take a few days)

Break was fantastic...but way too short as most school breaks tend to be.  I got to spend a lot of time hanging out at my veterinary hospital back at home - helped, observed, caught up with friends.  Also read a few books, walked the puppies a half dozen times, and spent some time with my family (well, parents but no siblings).  One of the dogs broke with ringworm while I was home, so taking care of that was a joy.  She looks incredibly goofy now with a shaved patch on her back.  On Thursday I picked the boy up from his day at work, and we drove to his place in Pittsburgh for the weekend.  We didn't have very much time together since I had to drive back east then get to the Philly airport on Sunday, but it was still great seeing him (as always).  He'll be out here for a visit not this weekend but the one after.  Can't wait!

I was really hoping that break would get me all excited and refreshed to come back to school and power through the last few weeks of the semester.  But mostly it spoiled me and made me not want to do much yesterday after school.

Tonight has been more productive so far but I'm definitely looking at a steep hill of information to climb before this is all over.

There's a histology quiz coming up on Friday, but I'm not super-concerned about that one.  We started the skull/cranium/head in anatomy and holy cow is there a lot of stuff to learn.  About two dozen bones, three dozen little holes and divots, random muscles and papillae, and things that like to run in and out of said holes and papilla.  Yikes.  I also have paid zero attention to physiology stuff outside of class since the last exam, so I need to buckle down and start studying for the final in a few weeks.  And that class has been involving a lot of pathways and endocrinology, so it's definitely not light material.  Lots and lots to do.  We only have six quizzes to worry about until finals week, but there isn't a whole lot of grace time until that rolls around.  I have a feeling the next few weeks are going to fly by.

Still haven't found or come up with a Halloween costume yet...hope I have time to pull something together before the vet school party on Saturday!

And before I get too comfortable with this "study break", back to my notes.

Home again, home again.

Fall Break officially started after class yesterday, but we were all unofficially on mental vacation immediately after getting out of that anatomy exam on Wednesday.  Both Thursday and Friday were days that involved most of the class staring blankly at professors as we tried to stay focused.  It was really tough absorbing anything knowing that freedom was so close. 

On Thursday I attended another information panel about internships and residencies, this one consisting of current interns and residents at the school in addition to recent grads of those programs.  They all stressed the importance and value of an internship whether you intend to go on to a residency or not.  It's a difficult year of hard work and little rest but you learn a loooot in that time that will put you way ahead of the curve of new graduates.  Definitely something I'm going to seriously consider whether general practice or specialization ends up being my calling.

Other than that, I managed to get my laundry done and apartment cleaned with all of the spare time that I had.  Pretty great.

Today, though, I got to be really disgusting and pig out at the NC State Fair, which is held right across the street from the vet school.  I signed up to work a shift at the vet school T-shirt booth this morning and then spent the rest of the day with a few friends enjoying the fair.  Lots of adorable farm animals were being shown, fun rides everywhere, and, of course, tasty food.  Funnel cake was an absolute win!  There was also a booth with all apple stuff, and they had one of those old-fashioned apple peeler/corer/slicer gizmos.  I think I might need to search Ebay for one for my own kitchen!

Tomorrow at lunch time I get to get on a plane and head home for a solid week!  Can't freaking wait!  I'm spending until Thursday at home with my mom and dad and my adorable puppies then I visit the boy in Pittsburgh until Sunday.  I should be a good student and bring home some schoolwork to do...but I'm not.  And it feels amazing.

Urgh.

I'm exhausted.

Anatomy exam was lame and difficult, and I felt crappy afterwards.

Anatomy lab and lecture tomorrow despite crappy exam today.

Arm is sore from second rabies shot.

My brain is already on Fall Break, but I have two more days of waking up at 6:00 am.

Hung out with friends tonight and griped, which was a plus.

I'm exhausted.  Bedtime.

Best study music? "Battlestar Galactica" soundtracks.

Two on the list are done!  Histology quiz was finished on Friday, and we had our quiz on the anatomy of the pelvic cavity today.  Tomorrow is the bacteriology quiz...for which I'm sorely under prepared.  The class has turned into a dangerous game of recognition rather than recalling information.  I wish it wasn't that way, but there just isn't enough time in the day or week to do everything right all the time.  My grade in that class is good so far, and the quiz tomorrow is something I'm letting slip a little.  I mean, I've studied, but I don't know everything as well as I should. 

Definitely have my mind focused more on the humongous anatomy exam on Wednesday. 

As far as that one goes, I already feel like I've reached my "saturation point" with the material where no matter what other studying I do, I know it as well as I will for the exam.  Still have two hours of lab time tomorrow to review (probably will focus on practicing reading radiographs) and tomorrow night to finish up any loose ends.  Can't freaking wait to finish that exam and walk out of school on Wednesday afternoon.  I plan on doing NOTHING that night...and ideally every night until we come back from Fall Break.

I was talking to one of my vet school friends today, and we were comparing notes on our relations with family and friends right now.  We both agreed that we've become incredibly...boring since school started.  Nothing really changes day to day, and unless I have a TAU lesson with live animals or learn some really weird or bizarre fact in class, I have nothing to report.  Ever.  I talk to my boyfriend every night on the phone, and while he always has something to tell me about his travels or his work day or the movie he saw that night or hanging out with friends, I don't have much to share in return.  Whenever he asks, "How did your day go?  What'd you do this weekend?  What'd you do for fun?", the answer is always, "It was okay.  I stayed in and studied.  I went to lab and studied.  I didn't really do anything fun...but I did open a new box of cereal!"  It's the same with when I talk to my family or other friends. 

While I love school (except for getting really tired of studying sometimes), love that I'm here, love my new friends, and love that I get to pursue this career...the day-to-day aspects of first year are really pretty boring if we're being honest with each other.  School 8-4:30 pm each day, home to relax for an hour or two, dinner by myself, study for two or three hours, call the boy, bed.  Repeat. 

I think it'll get more thrilling as time goes on and we break out of the basic into more applied sciences.  At least I know that our clinical year will be exciting if worse comes to worst! :)  Well, back to studying.  Don't know if I can remember these Streptococcal secreted factors any better, but I'll try.

Pathology?

We had a pretty informative lunch meeting today for the PathHeads club about summer job opportunities and externships in the pathology field.  Really would love to get one of those for the coming summer break.  There's the chance to work in the clinical pathology lab at the vet school, which would be helpful no matter what career I enter.  Think that'll be on my short-list of applications this year.

Pathology is pretty freaking cool and something I'm seriously interested in exploring as a possible career.  Just being able to see how everything fits together in a case and either be instrumental in designing the best possible treatment plan (if you're in clinical path) or figuring out what happened in a case post mortem (if you're in anatomical path) is amazing.  The fact that disease follows a set, almost regimented, series of steps and that hardly anything is random or unexplainable in the body is amazing, and pathologists are lucky enough to be the ones who put all the pieces and steps together in a logical order.

I still am so unsure of what I want to do, but this avenue for my future career appeals to me more every time I hear and learn about it.  There's also a dinner talk coming up with hospital interns and residencies about pursuing further training after completing a veterinary degree.  We heard from an admissions committee member a few weeks ago in our careers class, and that was a frightening and sobering talk.  I'd love to hear more about the process of getting there and the experience of being there from doctors who are just now in the middle of it.  I'm sure it'll still be overwhelming to think about, but hopefully some good information will come out of it.

And on the subject of stuff involving live animals, my TAU group had our dairy cattle lab today.  I LOVE dairy medicine.  Like, a lot.  You can't get much better than a cow for a patient, and they really are incredible animals.  Next time you're near an adult Holstein cow (meaning female, already had at least one baby), take a look at the abdomen.  You'll see these big pipe-like ripples running through the skin.  Those are veins and arteries that are supplying the udder!  To produce an average of 23,000 pounds of milk per year (seriously!!!) they have to send an enormous amount of blood to the udder all day, every day.  Amazing, amazing stuff.  But anyway, we got to cast the cows (meaning, pull them down with ropes to do a physical exam with them prone), halter them, and practice bleeding from the tail veins.  That class is sooooo much fun - getting to be outside, working with live animals in beautiful fall weather, and learning about hands-on veterinary care is a blast.

This weekend is going to be consumed with huge amounts of studying.  The anatomy exam on Wednesday is going to eat up the majority of my time, but I'd like to squeeze some bacteriology in there as well...seeing as how we have a quiz on Tuesday.  Anatomy is pretty amazing.  Seeing how everything fits together, how form and function are so meshed, and how species can be both incredibly similar but vastly different is lots of fun.  However, being in the lab for 10+ hours per week, plunging your hands into a plastic tub to pull out a male reproductive tract specimen (testes and all), and opening your locker to smell a big whiff of formalin can make it lose some of its charm. 

Once this exam is over and I can enjoy Fall Break, I think I'll be refreshed and ready to finish up the last weeks of the semester.  Until then, I'll see you in the lab.

Learn and purge commences...now.

Learning, regurgitating, and purging information is NOT what I want to be doing.  I mean, I'd rather do anything but study at this point, but I am referring more to the purging step.  I want to retain everything I can.  I want to learn and make lasting connections.  I want to feel like I will get to the point where I can quickly rattle off a diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment plan immediately after a physical exam.  And stuck in first semester midterms without enough time to fully digest everything, it's hard to see how that will happen.

On Tuesday, I spent two hours in the hospital ICU observing patient care and shadowing the staff.  There was an intern and an internal medicine resident there, and I got to listen in on rounds as they switched off the patients from the day to the night staff.  I could follow a lot of their discussion, but there were times when I felt just awe-inspired by how confident they were in their clinical skills - and the intern is only four years ahead of me in training!  It was an awesome night, and I learned quite a bit - there was a post-PDA surgery puppy, a kitty with a chylothorax, a dog with splenic tumors, etc.  It was pretty cool to see so many of the topics we've discussed in lecture presented there as real, live cases.  But at the same time, as I was leaving for home, I couldn't help feeling this niggling doubt that getting to the point where I was the intern left on duty for the night was more than I could handle.

I'm doing fine in school - better actually than I thought I would be - but being trapped in this cycle of "learn this piece of information, process it as much as you can (but only half as much as you'd like), write it on an exam, tuck it away or flush it to make room for more" is demoralizing at times.  I mean, I can barely remember the main channel blood flow from the thoracic limb, which we learned only two months ago, without reviewing!  How am I ever going to learn all of the stuff needed to actually TREAT a patient?  I guess it comes with time, but it's slightly overwhelming to think about right now.

But back to regurgitation.

In the next four school days I have a histology quiz (cardiovascular, endocrine, renal, and respiratory systems), anatomy quiz (pelvic cavity), bacteriology quiz (mycoplasm, clostridium, strep, staph), and our first major anatomy exam (everything but the head).  There's just not enough time to really learn everything.  All you can do is study and learn for the exam, try to make some lasting connections in your head with the material, take the test, and immediately switch gears for the next.  It'll be a fuuuuun week ahead.  I forsee a lot of time spent in the anatomy lab this weekend.  But this time next week, I'll be waking up for class knowing I don't have another evaluation for over 14 days!  Cannot freaking wait.

I also got my first rabies shot yesterday, which was pretty exciting.  They pull out this huge needle to mix the vaccine, and it was kind of funny to watch everyone's eyes bulge out of their heads.  It actually didn't hurt much at all (the needle they use for injection was pretty tiny), and my arm is only a teensy bit sore.  The next in the series is next Wednesday and the last will be two weeks after that.  It'll be pretty cool to finally be a vaccinated staff member at a hospital!

Heading in to school in a few minutes.  Starting off the day with anatomy lab bright and early.  The smell of formalin at 9:00 am is pretty glorious.

Fall Break - Two Weeks!

And man, break couldn't get here soon enough.  All of us feel like we've been in school forever, even though it's only been about two months.  Time goes by soooooo fast but we've also done so much in that time that having a break is going to feel amazing.

I had the boy here for a visit this weekend, so I didn't get a whole lot of school stuff done.  There was an anatomy quiz today that I had to study for but that was about it on the immediate horizon - think it went okay, and now I'm switching gears to the huuuuge exam next Wednesday on everything but the head.  There are 90 practical questions and a double-length written portion.  And it's cumulative. Yuck.

Anyway, it was a great weekend and a fun visit.  We grabbed some dinner on Friday at this awesome bistro with huge pieces of cake - 8" by 8" by 4"!  Yes, everything comes back to food for me.  Cake was good - we ended up ordering it first since the kitchen was taking a while - and then we ended with dinner.  Relaxed for the rest of the night before spending Saturday in Pinehurst with his dad and grandparents (he was down visiting them for a few days after a business trip in Virginia).  We met them at a town-wide flea market and spent a few hours walking around and enjoying the weather before heading to their place for dinner.  His family is a lot of fun, and it's nice to be able to spend time with people who aren't talking about some aspect of school during every waking moment.  And I'm 110% guilty of that too when I'm with my classmates.  You can't help it!  Sunday we did some more lounging around, movies, shopped for a class gift for one of our anatomy instructors, and split the apartment for a few hours that night so we could both get some work done. 

Even though we didn't really do much, I was freaking exhausted today.  He stays up later than I do, (I'm in bed by 11:00 at the latest, he pushes it until 12:30) and that forces me into staying up to a later hour as well.  Then, since I still need to get some sort of work done on the weekends, I usually get up at 6:30 or 7:00 am to squeeze in two or three hours of school stuff before getting him out of bed.  Six hours of sleep a night isn't bad during the week, but when I don't have that weekend to sleep in a bit and recover from school, I feel a little groggy.  Plus, he heads out early on Monday, so I was up this morning to see him off at 5.  Felt so tired all day, so even though I really ought to get some work done, I'm going to bed early tonight.  Won't be able to make it through this week in a productive manner if I'm majorly sleepy.

Figure I'll try to make it up by being extra-good at studying each night!  We'll see how that goes...

And, Friday.

And one of our weeks from heck this semester is coming to a close.  Phew. 

I don't think I saw anyone in our class who wasn't looking a little sleepy or bleary-eyed at least once this week.  Honestly, we didn't even have THAT much stuff to deal with (not compared to what finals week will be), but it sure felt like a lot to handle all at once.

Bacteriology was up first on Tuesday, and boy, do I wish I hadn't studied as much as I did.  I had a feeling it was going to be pretty easy, but I think most of our class was walking out of there within about forty minutes of getting the test.  Not bad at all!  He asked a lot of very broad questions involving matching of bacteria with the disease processes they cause, so nothing was too tricky.  Plus, he built in nearly a 10% curve with his bonus questions.  Seriously.  I think he really likes our class - we ask a lot of questions, stay pretty engaged in lecture, and had a really good showing to the review session this weekend.  We've been told that the difficulty of the class and exams really does get based on a lot of these factors, so hopefully he continues to think we're doing a good job before the final exam.

Physiology was yesterday.  Oy.  Not nearly as much fun.  I started studying this past weekend rather than focusing on bacteriology because I knew it would be the tougher exam.  Now, this was way before a lot of my classmates started working on it.  A lot of them only got the chance to really sit down with physio starting on Tuesday after bacteriology; given how I felt after the test, I can only imagine how others must have felt, especially functioning on only two or three hours of sleep.  I studied quite a bit, felt okay (not amazingly great, but confident), and I don't really know how I did on the test.  It was tough, and I thought some of the questions were tricky, worded in a way that didn't make me confident I understood what he was asking, let alone what he wanted in a response.  There were definitely some not-so-happy students mulling around after the test, so it'll be interesting to see how the class does as a whole.  Oh well - can't win 'em all!

I am currently working on my evidence-based-medicine exam which is a take-home due on Sunday.  Not much to say except it's a very vaguely worded test, and I'm not quite sure I'm answering everything in the right vein.  I was going to turn it in today, but I've already gotten two class-wide e-mails from him answering student questions that have made me change or revise my own answers.  Think I'll hang onto it until Sunday in case there are any more alterations I have to make.

Other than that, I was so happy to get the chance to bake this week - great stress therapy!  Cake for our class birthday celebration on Wednesday, pumpkin rolls for the bake sale on Thursday, and pumpkin cinnamon rolls which are currently in the oven...just because!  Plus my apartment is cleaned up and de-cluttered, so life is good.

It's been raining tons and tons for the past week - we definitely needed it but geez, people cannot drive here in inclement weather!  I almost got hit by at least three cars yesterday, half the cars don't have their headlights on during the storms, and people like to drive 35 mph in a 60 mph zone because it's raining.  Not pouring, not majorly storming...just raining.  Ugh.  It's really cloudy and windy out right now, but no rain.  Hope it holds off for a while because I have my goat handling lab outside this morning!  Very excited!

Think I'm going to go wake up the boy for breakfast - he's here for the weekend and still asleep in the next room.  I have to start studying for the anatomy quiz on Monday.  Not sure when that will get done exactly, but it's definitely worth putting it off to have him here for a visit.

Two weeks until fall break!!!