Anatomy Goats

My anatomy goat is a girl.

And she's pregnant...

... with twins. (At least we don't cut the uterus open until next week...)

:(

And, the new professor told us that they try to make sure that all goats used in anatomy lab are pregnant. That makes me really sad! So, rather than just 1 life per group that has a female goat, we're taking 2 or 3. That seems wasteful to me.

Cow feet are even weirder than horse feet

They really are! The blood supply and nerves to the feet of ruminants are insane.

There are names like "proper axial digital nerve II." Really, do we need that many names? Apparently, yes, but like, really? Calm down anatomists.

Goats

Goats are strange... or at least, our anatomy goats are strange.


I cannot for the life of me figure out why the fat over their shoulders has approximately the texture of cottage cheese.

Horse Palpations

I did another practice round for my horse palpation exam today.

And we got help from Dr. Bratton-- who was a large animal practitioner, was an assistant in my small animal anatomy lab and is assisting in neuro this semester (he used to teach it).

As Stephanie said: "Learning horse palpation from Dr. Bratton is sort of like taking a religion class from God."

And it really is! He's awesome! And so helpful! And I cannot express how grateful I am that he'd give up some of his weekend to come help us!

Guts are gross (and other sundry Anatomy talk)

I know it sounds rather self explanatory, but really, I didn't have a good concept of how gross guts are before we opened the abdominal cavity of our anatomy horses last Tuesday and the cut them out and dug around in them on Wednesday.

The smell was overwhelming. Usually in lab, we get used to the smell by the end of lab. Not that time. Not even a little. It didn't help that some of the horses weren't as well preserved as others, so there were some rotting abdominal contents discovered. (At least ours were well preserved. Actually, they were quite nice.)

Overall, ours wasn't terrible. But all of the steps involving draining intestinal contents were not fun. Not fun at all. Someone had the bright idea to drain our horse's left ventral colon (a relatively early part of the large intestines) by cutting a slit in it, shooting water up it, and then upending it over the floor. It was... nasty... to say the least. It also managed to clog the drain twice, so he had to pull out the drain and dump the catch into the tissue collection bucket.




Then, today, we cut the horse in half. Literally. We took a hack saw to the back, right at the end of the rib cage. We're doing all the pelvic cavity dissection sort of head on. I am forced to wonder, however, how useful a view this is. There will never be any time in anybody's future career in which they will hack a horse in half to go about their procedure.

First Day of Second Semester!

This semester should be quite an experience. We spend a lot more time in class, therefore we have a lot less time during the day at school to study and a lot sadder schedule (we have physiology at 8AM every day... instead of having it every day but at different times so we had 9AM Monday starts and 10AM Friday starts.)

Overall, the classes seem like they won't be so bad. There's a lot of reproduction, which is not my favorite, but it should be ok. It's just 1 unit of physiology and 6 weeks of embryology.

Schedule:
Monday
8 - 8:50 AM -- VTPP 912 Physiology II
9 - 9:50 AM -- VIBS 913 Microscopic Anatomy II
10 - 10:50 AM – VIBS 912 Gross Anatomy II
11 - 11:50 AM – VTPB 911 Veterinary Microbiology
1 - 2:50 PM – VIBS 913L Microscopic Anatomy II Lab
3 – 4:50 PM – VIBS 912L Gross Anatomy II Lab

Tuesday
8 - 8:50 AM -- VTPP 912 Physiology II
9 - 9:50 AM -- VIBS 912 Gross Anatomy II
12 - 2:50 PM -- VIBS 912L Gross Anatomy II Lab
3 - 4:50 PM – VMID 913 Clinical Correlates II

Wednesday
8 - 8:50 AM -- VTPP 912 Physiology II
11 - 11:50 AM -- VTPB 911 Veterinary Microbiology
1 - 2:50 PM – VTPB 911L Veterinary Microbiology Lab
3 – 4:50 PM – VIBS 913L Microscopic Anatomy II Lab

Thursday
8 - 8:50 AM -- VTPP 912 Physiology II
9 - 9:50 AM -- VIBS 913 Microscopic Anatomy II
10 - 11:50 AM – VTPP 912L Physiology Lab
1 - 2:50 PM – VIBS 913L Microscopic Anatomy II Lab
3 – 4:50 PM – VIBS 912L Gross Anatomy II Lab

Friday
8 - 8:50 AM -- VTPP 912 Physiology II
9 - 9:50 AM – VIBS 926 Public Health
11 - 11:50 AM -- VTPB 911 Veterinary Microbiology