Nerdiness continues

Well, I may be done with the semester, but that doesn't mean I'm staying away from school. Go ahead, laugh! I laugh at myself a little too.

Several departments within the VTH are particularly understaffed (I guess "understaffed" is the best word, even though it's not like we get paid!) over winter break when the juniors aren't in school.

So ambitious (a nicer word than "geeky," right?) 3rd year students can sign up to volunteer in those departments (community practice, internal medicine, and cardiology) to basically do the same things that the seniors do.

It's actually a cool opportunity, and one that I also took advantage of during Thanksgiving break.

During the spring and fall semesters, for example, community practice normally has 6-10 senior students and 6-10 junior students. Half of the juniors see medicine appointments all week, while the other half spend Tues/Wed/Thurs mornings in surgery. During a typical week, half of the seniors head down to the humane society for spay/neuter on Monday mornings, and all but 1 or 2 of the seniors are in surgery at the VTH on Tues/Wed/Thurs mornings, leaving 3-5 juniors and 1-2 seniors to handle the medicine appointments on those middle days of the week. Everybody does medicine appts on Friday.

On vacation weeks (i.e. this week and next week), there are no surgeries, so all of the seniors are seeing medicine appointments. However, since there are no juniors, you can imagine that things can still be a little shorthanded.

Now consider that half of the seniors get the week before Christmas as a vacation week, and the other half take off the week before New Year's.

So now you're down to 3-5 seniors and no juniors each week.

Enter the nerdy juniors who want more experience! (i.e. me)

I went in all day on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, which was great because there were only 3 seniors! The schedule was lighter than usual, but still I got to see plenty of appointments.

A couple cases I saw on Tuesday:

**An 8 year old Great Dane with vaginal discharge, arthritis, generalized pruritus (itchiness) due to food/environmental allergies, and horrible halitosis. Checked out her teeth (just the expected dental disease of a senior dog), acquiesced to the owners' request for a steroid injection to help with the allergies, re-started her on some tramadol for the arthritis pain, and gave some antibacterial/antifungal wipes for the perivulvar dermatitis.

**An 8 month old little white fluffy dog flying to Texas with her owner the following day, in need of a health certificate for the airline. (Note to anybody out there traveling with their pets: If you want a health certificate, bring proof of your pet's vaccines!)

**I was supposed to have an 11 year old Lab cross with a cough of several months' duration, but he never showed up. I spent a couple hours researching various causes of coughing in older dogs, which made it a little disappointing when I had no patient to diagnose, but was still good for my brain.

A couple cases I saw on Wednesday:

**An 18 month old Pekingese/Poodle cross (no, I will not call it a Peekapoo) with the unfortunate habit of peeing all over everything when he gets too excited. Mom wanted to know if there was any medication he could be on (apparently the dog has recently started peeing on Dad if Dad is holding him when anybody else enters the room). Dog also had a history of luxating patellas, which Mom reports were manipulated so many times at the last visit that the dog couldn't walk for "weeks" afterward (really? why didn't you call and tell us about that?) and Mom kept saying "If anybody -- ANYBODY -- touches his knees today, we're never coming back!" Little guy also needed a re-enrollment in the VTH's preventive health program, bordetella and DA2P vaccines, deworming, fecal sample to be brought in later, and a quote for a teeth cleaning. It was kind of a high maintenance appointment...

**My favorite owners of the week! Who came in with their 5 year old 90 lb Boxer for his heartworm test and vaccines. He'd only been to the VTH previously for a TPLO (ACL repair) surgery a year ago. The nicest dog, and the nicest people. We ran a heartworm test, vaccinated for bordetella and DA2P, signed him up on a preventive health plan, dewormed, sent home a fecal sample cup to be returned, gave him 6 months of heartworm/flea/tick prevention, and decided to bring him back in the spring to start lepto vaccines.

I'm signed up for a couple more days in January, before classes start again on Jan 18. I'm trying not to overdo it, but community practice is so fun, and I learn so many new things every time I volunteer there. Plus, as a junior, it's really the only place where I get to have primary case management of my patients, and I don't have any more official weeks of it in the spring! And we don't have ANY junior rotations until mid-February, so I'll be extra-deprived of hands-on contact with actual live animals! (Ok, I think I'm convincing myself to sign up for a couple more days...)

Done and.... done

My 5th semester of vet school is over! Sound the trumpets! Cheers of excitement all around!

Or whatever.

Seriously, this past semester sort of flew by. Until we got to finals week. Then it slowed to serious snail pace.

From Friday (the last day of classes) to the following Tuesday (during finals week), I took 12 exams.

Yes, let's count 'em: 12

Friday:

1. Parasitology online exam (for parasitology rotation)

2. Parasitology practical exam (for parasitology rotation)

3. Swine medicine online final

Saturday:

Study, study, study, study, study....

Sunday:

4. Clinical Sciences 4 Ophthalmology/Oncology midterm

Monday:

5. Radiology final

6. ClinSci 4 Ophthalmology final

7. ClinSci 4 Oncology final

8. ClinSci 4 Critical Care final

Tuesday:

9. ClinSci 4 Dermatology final

10. ClinSci 4 Large Animal infectious/immune/systemic disease final

11. ClinSci 4 Small Animal infectious disease final

12. ClinSci 4 Small Animal immune disease final

(And I'll point out that I took #11 and #12 after arriving home at 10 pm from a handbell concert in Cheyenne.)

Whew!

Now, admittedly those finals were pretty exhausting. But I also have to say that I feel like I've accomplished greater advances in my veterinary education during this past semester than during any other term so far in my vet school career.

Through the combination of junior practicum and my Clinical Sciences courses in particular, it's been so neat to have the chance to integrate and put into practice everything that I've learned over the last 2 years.

For example, we've moved beyond 2nd-year "This is how different types of antibiotics work" to "We know that you all know how different types of antibiotics work, so let's see how we use them to treat dermatological diseases." We're past "Here are the basics of how different parts of the kidney function in a healthy animal" and on to "Here's what leptospirosis does to a cow's kidneys." From "Let's discuss the different life stages of nematodes (blah blah blah)," we've moved on to "This is the most common nematode in yearling horses and here's how you treat it." It's no longer just "Vaccines in dogs are either 'core' or 'non-core'," but "YOU decide which vaccines are most important for this particular dog which such-and-such a lifestyle."

And (drum roll, please) I've officially finished all of my core large animal courses for the remainder of vet school! On a related and somewhat alarming note, that also means that I've officially learned everything that I will supposedly need to pass all of the horse/cow/goat/sheep/pig/chicken/llama/alpaca questions on national boards...

Next spring's core classes will be Small Animal Medicine & Surgery I and II. We also have Applied Animal Behavior (which I'm sure will also include some large animal material, much to my disappointment) and Professional Practice Management (which had better be more useful than my non-vet-school business classes so far!).

But for now, it's nice to be on break. Yes, I'm continuing to be a nerd and spend time volunteering in Community Practice. And yes, I'll be itching to get back into classes within the next few weeks.

But I really feel like I've accomplished something big over the last 4 months.

I actually learned something in Parasitology!

My last rotation of the fall semester was... the dreaded Parasitology!

Anyone who's been reading my blog for more than a year and a half will remember several posts about my freshman Parasitology course that indicated, well, a rather vehement dislike of the course material and the instructor.

So you can't blame me for not being excited for 20 hours of hands-on parasitology right before finals week.

However (and I am having a little trouble saying this), the Junior Practicum version of parasitology was actually interesting and, dare I say, applicable to my future career in clinical practice!

The rotation set-up was as follows:

Monday: Large and small animal ectoparasites

Tuesday: Small animal endoparasites

Wednesday: Food/fiber animal endoparasites

Thursday: Equine endoparasites

Friday: Online and practical exams

Since I spent 5 or so hours on an airplane and what seems like twice that riding in a car the weekend prior to this rotation, I took the instructor's suggestion to review all of our notes from freshman year. Yes, I'm telling you that I actually read through an entire semester's worth of notes about parasite life cycles. And I only fell asleep a couple times.

Actually, it was a good review, if only to get the most basic points about the most important parasites back in my head, and to put the species names of all of the rest of the parasites into my short-term memory for greater ease in recalling them during this rotation.

So one of the coolest parts of this rotation was that we spent 1-2 hours every morning figuring out "unknowns." That means you'd walk around the room to different stations, and each would say "Removed from the ear of an alpaca" or "Found on a dog" or "Present in the abomasum of a sheep at necropsy" and you'd look at whatever creepy crawly was in the jar and have to figure out what it was.

At first, this was frustrating, mainly because in our freshman lecture course, we never saw ANY pictures of any of the critters we learned about. No photos of worm eggs on a fecal float, no pictures of different types of ticks, no inkling of what a roundworm looks like when passed in the feces. So we were really starting from scratch.

However, by the end of the week I'd come to believe that this was one of the best strategies they could have used to teach us about this stuff. After all, I'm not going to become a parasitologist after graduation from vet school. Sure, I'll be able to identify fleas, and maybe the most common types of ticks in whatever region of the country I end up practicing. But I'll probably see weird things regularly that will send me off to find my parasitology textbooks (and somehow I've managed to accumulate 5 or 6 of those).

So all in all, parasitology rotation was more about teaching us how to look up information about the things we don't know, than learning to identify Amblyomma maculatum or Eucoleus eggs off the top of our heads. And that's the way it should be.

"Ate a lot of German food"

Sometimes, when reviewing my notes from lecture before an exam, I run across something I wrote that makes me wonder exactly what my thought process was in considering it to be something relevant enough to write down.

Such as this caption I typed below a photo of a grotesquely obese Dachshund:

"Above: dog had cancer, ate a lot of German food, couldn't even walk."

Yep, that better be on the oncology exam that I'm gearing up to take in a couple hours... otherwise my note-taking will have been in vain!

Quote of the Day, Vol. 6

Alas, I should have known that the post I started yesterday morning about how many things I have to do in the next 6 days and how little time/motivation I have to do them, would never get finished and posted last night. Adios, Thursday's post.

Instead, I bring you this nice little quote from one of my critical care professors, in a lecture yesterday on triage of emergency patients:

"The nice thing about eyeballs is you can live without them."

I can picture my ophthalmology profs screeching.

P.S. Happy second-to-last last-day-of-classes-of-the-semester EVER! 4 hours of parasitology exams and 2 hours of lecture, here I come! (To be followed of course by my swine med final taken this evening... because who has anything better to do on a Friday night?)

Sigh

Nothing brightens your morning quite like getting up 10 minutes early to read about fecal flotation techniques.... how many more days till winter break??

Take-home messages

Here are a few other miscellaneous lessons learned this week on cadaver/bone specimen lab:

1. Horse head soup smells exactly the same as dog and cat head soup.

2. It hurts when you stab yourself with the drill bit.

3. If it takes you an hour to wire together your first dog skull, it will only take 10 minutes for the second one.

4. There is just no good way to put into words the way the slimy-sticky-oily-gummy coating on the lunch trays that are used to hold the cadaver bits feels on your hands.

And finally, my #1 source of entertainment for this week:

Watching the looks on other people's faces as you walk around campus holding a box full of dog bones.

(Yes, I could have crammed them into the box so nobody could see, but where's the fun in that? I love seeing people's eyes bug out of their heads...)