White Coat Ceremony

Today is our White Coat Ceremony. When it was introduced to us, they said it's traditionally a marker of your transition from preclinical to clinical studies. While that sounds like a lovely idea, it seems a bit premature. Second year is completely classroom just like first year (though they apparently spend less time in lab, which will be nice.) Third year starts a combination of clinical and classroom. So, I think maybe the White Coat Ceremony would fit better between second and third years.

Oh well, it should be a nice ceremony and a nice white lab coat. (though I still wish I had a lab coat like the ones on Bones. They manage to have a shape, besides giant solid color rectangle.)

Foal Team False Alarm

I'm actually a little bummed about it!

My foal team was on call last night from midnight to 8AM. At about 10 I got a call saying a foal was coming in around 12:30 and they'd need us there to help. I was scheduled for the second half of the shift (4AM-8AM... we're split into an A group of 3 people and a B group of 3 people who rotate first and second half of shift on call), so I went to bed pretty much right away.

Then, I got a text at 2:45 that we didn't have to go in. B group got the blood work and radiographs done.. and the foal wasn't down, so they got sent home and we didn't have to go in.

I'm kind of sad. While I'm glad not to have had to leave my apartment at 3:45 AM, it would have been neat to play with a baby foal!

Braaaaaains

Only in vet school (or, I suppose medical school) would you take a test in which there are a bunch of brains floating in little tubs of water.

There's something surreal about walking into a room full of buckets of brains.

(Nevermind that they were all cut up in totally bizarre ways, which, in fact, can make it very hard to identify structures you're used to seeing from other angles or in reference to structures that were lopped off on the test specimen.)


Oh well, now that the neuro exam is over it's time to catch up in Microbiology!

Blog Every Day April

I heard about this idea on a message board. It's mostly aimed to help those of us who tend to think "I just blogged!" only to realize it's been 2 weeks.

So, I'm going to try to BEDA this blog! Wish me luck!

Oops.

Sorry for the long absence. Vet school has been... time consuming.

And given that I try to keep the tone here relatively upbeat, there's been very little of interest to say about school, lately. It's been a rough semester. The best thing about it is that the end is quickly approaching.

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.

Foal Team

My friend Caroline convinced me to sign up for Foal Team. It's essentially a class that counts towards credit 3rd year, but mostly it's for experience dealing with horses. We're on call at certain times to go in and help monitor baby foals that need ICU kind of supportive care. It sounds pretty interesting.

However, the coordinators randomly assigned groups and group leaders... and I'm stuck being one. It's a little bit of a raw deal, especially given that I don't really know anyone in my group. However, I now have it divided up so that out of each 8 hour shift we're assigned, each group member is only on call for 4 of those hours (however, the ICU people will only ever call me, and I have to call the rest of the people. Boo!)


So, I'm hoping it will be an interesting experience, but I'm a little worried! My first on call shift is this Friday, from 4-8PM. (The whole shift is 4PM-midnight.)