“… and then you had an epiphany.”

Love him or hate him, I find Dr. Willard’s lecture style in our (pre-)correlates class hilarious.

We’re given a case presentation and lab data about a week before class and are expected to generate a list of the most likely diagnoses, a set of tests we’d like to run to narrow it down more, and what we would do to treat the animal right then. In class, he calls on people from the class roster and asks them questions about the case. (He’s always going to ask you why you said what you said, too.)

If you’re wrong, he corrects you by saying, “… and then you had an epiphany…”

I have to try really hard not to crack up every time he says it! It such a hilarious and tactful way to say that you’re wrong and you should try again. (It can get frustrating, though, to watch a classmate flounder while you have an answer you’d like to give.)

Funny/Interesting Things Professors Say #4

Professor quotes

Path
“and if you’re a human… which everyone in here is…”
“It’s the retching of all retching…”
“If you have proteinuria… let me know!”
“If you’re a person, and we all are…”


Inf. Dz
“If I can’t latch on and I’m in the GI tract, I get washed out.”
“As you’re walking down the alley, the cows are lifting their tails and literally shooting it at you.”
“Veterinarians are the foremost poop-ologists.”
“That’s pretty close to screamin’ high.”

Tox
“Let me tell you what these stupid sheep do.”
“Any questions on LSD?”
“some people swear by fescue, other people swear at fescue.”
“I guess it’s ok to mutilate them as long as you don’t pick them.”
“I figure if they’re edible, I’ll eat them. I’m not picking anything off a cow patty.”
“people really want to get somebody else to pay for their mistakes.”
“We’ve been fighting France’s wars for year.”
“If you have to be bitten by one of these snakes… you want the copperhead.”

Surgery
“there are a lot of voices that go on in my head, but that’s not one of them”
“look at me! I can do hand ties. Breaks the ice with people..”
“It can be a pretty… whole body experience… to do those surgeries.”

Public Health
“What about the cool, new, sexy organisms.”
“I sit in the men’s restroom and hear the commode flush and I listen… then I hear the sink.”
“We need to learn from the blacks. They’re washing their hands.”
“There’s a stranger out there, and he’s got a pig under his coat. He’s probably a bioterrorist.”
“You’re supposed to know it.. but I’m not going to test on it because I can’t remember it either.”
“The kid gets overexcited about the kitten, the kitten gets underexcited about the kid, and voila! The gets scratched.)
“To a cat, the whole world is a litter box.”
“What are you, a laboratorian?”
“Are there any fish people… not fish people… aquarium types in here?”
“When you don’t have enclosed spaces for cats, you have escapees… which is sub-optimal.”
“45% of people have more than 1 pet… especially the cat folks.”
“long haired cats are like dust mops”
“it will turn a cat yellow… if you do it only once, it probably won’t be permanent.”
“I don’t know many dolphins that go hiking in the woods”
“lepto really, really likes Hawaii… can’t really blame it…”
“There’s nothing here that really screams ‘ I have leptospirosis!’”
“If you had to pick a brucella to be infected with… pick canis.”

Schedule!

They finally posted our elective schedules for next year! I'm pretty exicted about it! Though, there may be some changes later.

Sterile/Aseptic Technique

As it turns out, maintaining sterile technique for the length of an average teaching hospital surgery is going to be really hard to do! And in some ways incredibly frustrating.

First of all, my New Year's Resolution for 2010 was to stop chewing my fingernails (and cuticles.) So far, this has been a huge success. I had long, pretty fingernails. But, for proper surgical techinque your fingernails have to be 1-2 millimeters long and can't be painted. I cut them before lab last week to shorter than they've been since just after I quit chewing them... and they were still too long. I had to cut them even shorter before I could scrub in! And, I'll probably have to cut them again tomorrow because they've grown quite a bit since last week.

Then, there's scrubbing in which is, quite frankly, painful. It's not so bad on the fingertips and fingers, but when I get down to my palms and arms... ow! We have to use a really bristly brush and scrub at least 20 times per section (and you divide each finger into 4 sections, each hand into 4 sections, and each arm into 8 sections.) Also, we have to keep our arms held above our waist, with our elbows above our wrists. That doesn't sound hard until you try to hold your arms in that unatural position for 10 minutes or more.

The rest of the process is just a little hard to get the hang of. There's drying your hands while bent over a little bit and not touching the towel to yourself, the environment or an area you've already dried. Then there's putting on a gown without touching it to the table or the ground or putting your hands out of the sleeves. Then there's putting on gloves over the sleeves of your gown.

It's a hard set of new skills and habits to develop, but in the long run, it's worth it. If you learn top of the line now, when you slide a little in practice hopefully you'll still be good enough you aren't killing patients with infections.

“Expertise generally consists of doing a lot of small, boring, seemingly insignificant things very, very well”

Dr. Willard said this to the Internal Medicine club at a lunch meeting at one point and it’s really stuck with me. Because, it’s really true but I’d never thought about it that way before.

On TV, the experts in things have these really cool, sexy jobs where they do awesome stuff all the time. And while veterinarians get to do some really awesome things and save animal lives and such, the process of getting there and the process of doing it are actually rather small, boring and tedious.

As we’re going through the process of learning how to put together our cases for third year correlates, it turns out the process of diagnostic medicine is quite tedious. It’s nothing like House. Granted, we’re generally doing less rare (“zebra”) cases and more routine (“horse”) cases. Also, veterinary medicine is still very closely tied to your clients’ economics, unlike human medicine. We can’t just run hundreds of dollars of tests and hope something sticks, we have to pick the 1 or 2 tests that are most likely to get you the answer you need because that’s all your client is going to pay for.

So, basically, I’m going to keep trying to do these small, seemingly insignificant things very, very well!

Radiology

Radiology almost always feels like playing "Where's Waldo."

Sometimes it feels like a normal game- where you get the satisfaction of finding him. But most of the time, it feels like somebody gave Waldo an invisibility cloak.

The pointer flashes over an area of grey and wiggles around. You're supposed to be seeing a lung lobe, or a liver lobe, or a lymph node... Mostly, you nod, draw a circle on your notes in that area and hope you'll be able to see it when you sit down to study... Or that, at least, on the exam, you can pick something if they ask you to ID something in that area.

Poinsettias

I think it's pretty common myth/knowledge/lore that poinsettias are toxic to dogs. I know I had always heard that.

We learned this week in Toxicology that while poinsettias were quite toxic in the 70's, the ones sold commercially aren't anymore. The poinsettia sellers have bred the toxic agent out of the plants.

I think that's really awesome! (especially because it means I can have poinsettias at Christmas now! Sadly, lilies are still out.)

Pedagogy

One of my biggest problems with vet school is that our professors have little, or no, pedagogical training. So, while they’re by and large brilliant, interesting, nice people… a lot of them are terrible teachers. Either they don’t get how to organize a lecture, or they don’t do a good job of conveying the information they want us to know, or they’ll say things like “just do the clinically relevant stuff!” while as 2nd years we don’t have the experience yet to determine what’s relevant and what’s not, or they’ll not be any good at writing questions that evaluate what we learned.

Recently in our infectious disease class, the professor said “I’m terrible at writing test questions!”He’s known this for quite some time, and received many complaints about, but as far as I can tell, he hasn’t done anything to change it. I know that writing good questions is hard, but a big part of teaching is being able to write evaluations that accurately reflect how well the students learned!

April Fool’s Day

Overall, I had a very low-key April Fool’s Day. But the one prank I was privy to was hilarious!

In my 8AM surgery class, the professor came in and said that due to historically bad attendance in the second half of the course, the course coordinator had given her permission to administer the points for her section on the exam as a pop quiz. We all kind of nod and pull out some paper to write down our answers.

Then she puts up the first question and it’s really hard. We aren’t sure of the answer and are starting to sweat.

She puts up the second and it’s just mystifying. We have no idea! We didn’t talk about that!

She puts up the third question and it’s impossible. It’s something that might show up on the board exam to become a surgical specialist.

By then, I figure it out but most of my classmates are still panicking.

She puts up the last question and it’s just so impossible it’s hilarious.

Then she asked us what day it was, and you could just see the realization dawn on all of us.

We applauded.