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.