Johnny felt weird

Most nights, the cats get shut out of the bedroom so that we humans can actually try to get some sleep. And most nights, I end up waking up sometime in the early morning to go to the bathroom. The usual routine is that by the time I get out of bed and into the hallway, Simon is waiting there for me, and he follows me into the bathroom. If I leave the bedroom door open, Simon will run ahead of me and into the bedroom when I try to go back in, so I usually push the door mostly shut when I get up. That way, if Simon sneaks in, I'll know because the door will be open.

Note that, usually, Johnny plays no role in this whole nighttime interaction.

So this morning I woke up at 4:30 a.m., met Simon in the hallway, went to the bathroom, went back to the bedroom, making sure to keep Simon outside, shut the door, and got back in bed. Much to my surprise, there was something furry and warm under the covers where my feet are supposed to go.

Yes, it was Johnny who evidently snuck into the bedroom while I was in the bathroom. He made himself quite comfortable in his favorite spot, at the foot of the bed under multiple layers of blankets. It is so weird, because he is usually too lazy to even get out of bed (he sleeps on the guest room bed) when I get up in the night. He must have been feeling really lonely and wanted to snuggle. Normally I'd kick him out, but he seemed so desperate that I took pity and let him stay till CLH got up at 5 a.m. :-)

Do you ever...

Do you ever have something that you really, really don't want to do, so you do everything else you can think of, a whole bunch of things that are really unimportant at the moment, to avoid doing the thing you don't want to do?

Oh. Uh.... me neither.

But seriously, sometimes there is an assignment or an exam that I just cannot make myself study for.

Case in point: tomorrow's Biology of Disease exam.

Should I be studying? Absolutely! Do I want to? Absolutely not!

For the last few weeks, we freshman students have been enveloped with a low-grade but annoyingly persistent level of stress, due to a serious of first exams spaced out at regular, unrelenting intervals. It's been nothing overwhelming --- just enough stress that you can never completely relax. Or, if you do manage to relax, you still have the nagging suspicion that you are wasting valuable time that should be used for studying.

So instead of studying, what do you do?

• Oh, the kitchen is such a mess. Better fill up the dishwasher and wash the pots and pans. Need to clean the counters too.
• Hey, the cats' nails seem a little long. Must be time to clip them. While you're at it, they've been shedding a lot lately, so they should be brushed for awhile.
• We just had a parasitology exam last week, and it was pretty hard... now would be a great time to start a study guide for the next exam, even though it's multiple weeks away.
• They just opened a survey about nominating faculty members for awards! The deadline's not for quite awhile, but there's no time like the present...
• Time to run that one book I just finished back to the library.
• Enjoy posting on your blog? I think it's time for a post right now.
• Etc.
• Etc.
• Etc.

Bottom line: I better keep writing stuff, or I'll have no other choice but to actually start studying... BOO! Here I go...

MOUSE!!!

So I was sitting alone in good old Cube H at the end of lunch today, minding my own business, and trying to avoid going to Biology of Disease for as long as possible, when my rostral colliculus (yes, I am a NERD) oriented my head and eyes toward a sudden movement on the floor under a desk nearby.

Wow, I thought. That looks like a mouse. Ha ha, it's obviously not a mouse.

A few seconds pass.

Yes, it is.

A totally cute little brown/grey mouse with enormous ears! The thing was about 1 1/2 inches long, plus tail. It was evidently taking shelter in a little crack where the wall meets the floor. It was at an exterior wall, so I think it might have snuck in from the outside somehow.

The poor thing was really scared and shy. Anytime I moved, it would immediately scurry back into its little hidey hole. When I stood really, really still, it got brave enough to run most of the way across the room. I didn't really want it to go running down the hallway, so I started moving again and it went back to its little place.

But apparently there is someone in charge of pest control for the building, who will be "taking care of it." :-( Poor little mouse! Just because it might carry all sorts of contagious bacteria and viruses, doesn't mean it isn't cute!

And.......... a B

Yep, I finally got a B this semester. Twas the bacteriology exam that did me in. Harder, and more nit-picky, than expected. Oh well, I'll take an 86! All you need is 70%, so technically I am still an overachiever.

Obviously, it's still winter...

...since it's February 24th and they're forecasting a high of 65 degrees.

Weird. So weird.

Where is all the snow I pined for during my 4 years of exile in Arizona???

A-okay so far

4 exams so far this semester, and A's on all of them!

Bacteriology exam is tomorrow, and I'm feeling pretty good about that.

Still have a ways to go on my studying for Biology of Disease (exam on Thursday), but that one should be okay too.

Hooray!

An awesome couple of days

After last week's stress of 4 exams within 3 school days, the end of this week finished much more nicely.

Yesterday being Friday, I got to sleep in till 7:30. Then got up and walked/jogged on the treadmill for awhile, and had a shower.

Leisurely breakfast accompanied by checking out a brand-new set of games posted on my favorite game website, www.conceptispuzzles.com. Johnny snuggled on my lap while I was at the computer.

We had our first Biology of Disease laboratory, which ended up being quite helpful in putting together all the information we've learned in the last couple weeks and applying it to actual microscopic and gross specimens.

Finance was a breeze, and we finally talked about something that wasn't review and that I can see being applicable in real-life investment decisions.

I met a friend at the student center for an awesome lunch of Panda Express.

Then back to the cubes for a couple hours of studying, including finishing up my very valuable study guide for our bacteriology exam this coming Tuesday.

Got home in time to have the house cleaned up before CLH got home.

We had an easy dinner complete with leftover Valentine's Day cookies.

Then we watched "Jurassic Park 2" on VHS, and I learned how to use the tracking buttons on the VCR.

Off to bed for a solid 12 hours of sleep, waking up just before 10:30 this morning. (Yes, I am lazy... but it's not my fault that some of you people are physically incapable of sleeping past like 6:04 every morning.)

Another nice breakfast consisting of leftover chocolate-chip-raspberry-walnut muffins from Perkins, plus some of the cranberry-cinnamon-raisin-walnut bread I made last week.

And now, not much else to do this weekend besides laundry, a run to the grocery store, a bit of studying, and seeing "Marley & Me" at the dollar theatre with CLH. Tomorrow I'm going to try a new chocolate-and-peanut-butter bar recipe!

Quote(s) of the Day, Vol. 2

Professor in Biology of Disease:

"Vitamin D can be toxic. Especially to rabbits. You can kill as many rabbits as you want with a bottle of Vitamin D... if killing rabbits is your goal."

Professor in Parasitology:

"In humans, this can cause some intestinal upset, some gas and whatnot. But usually you and your tapeworm are very happy together."

I admit it, I was wrong

So, earlier this month I was feeling all kindly and pleased with our cats' good behavior. See:

http://thevetschooljourney.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-babies-are-growing-up-sniff.html

Due to a recent series of events, I can only conclude that while CLH and I are at work and school, Johnny & Simon get on the Internet and read my blog.

Here are some of the things they have done in the last couple weeks:

• Kept us awake all night. Eight nights out of ten, the cats get shut out of the bedroom so we (okay, I --- they never wake CLH up) can get some actual sleep. So that's about 6 nights a month that they get to sleep with us. Normally, about 4-5 of those 6 nights are spent sleeping, with only minor annoyances to the humans in the room. Lately, every opportunity for them to get near us while we try to get some shut-eye has ended in meowing, pouncing, wrestling, etc.
• Shredded the toilet paper. This is something they had never done until sometime around last October. All of a sudden, they decided that shredding the toilet paper was a highly entertaining activity. After weeks of keeping the bathroom door shut at all times or hiding the TP under the sink, we tried giving them access again and they were fine. Now, the TP habit has returned with a vengeance.
• Shredded the paper towels. Unlike shredding the toilet paper, shredding the paper towels is something that J&S will do every chance they get. It usually results from one of us (generally me) mistakenly leaving the paper towels in an accessible place.
• Dragged stuff around. They do this with some regularity, especially if we are both gone all day and they don't get their 4:30 pm meal on time. Items displaced in recent weeks have included socks, slippers, shirts, bathmats, dish towels, oven mitts, and several stuffed animals that they are not supposed to play with but I've pretty much given up on.
• Gone up on the counters on a near-daily basis. This has been a constant struggle ever since we've had them, regularly refueled by the fact that occasionally they manage to get up on the counters and we don't catch them before they get food, which only reinforces the bad habit. Lately, Simon has decided that it's a great idea to get up on the backside of the TV table, behind our 2-month-old flat screen TV. If he knocks it off, he's going up for adoption.

Today was the crowning glory of their misbehavior. CLH wasn't home last night, and I left at 7:10 this morning. Neither of us returned until 7:30 tonight. Evidently, three hours past normal dinner time was the straw that broke the kittens' back. We arrived home to discover that J&S had gotten the pop-top of the very full trashcan open and delighted in the disgusting contents. Fortunately, unlike some previous incidents, they only got the top open, rather than tipping the whole thing over --- thus, their access to the garbage was somewhat limited.

Nonetheless, I feel it's time for an apology.

Johnny, Simon, I now realize that you read my blog. I'd like to admit publicly that I was wrong in writing anything about you having grown up in even the slightest bit. You have made your point, and made it forcefully. I fully accept that you are still naughty little teenager cats. Feel free to cease your determined attempts to destroy our house, and return to your average amount of chaos. Thank you.

I like vet school

I feel like I've just been whining a lot in my posts lately, so here is a happy post.

I like vet school!

It is really neat to come to school every day and be with a bunch of people who are intelligent, motivated, and interested in basically the same thing as I am.

So despite the downs, there are plenty of ups, too.

Go Vet Students!

Weird exams

All of my exams so far this semester have had some odd aspect.

Parasitology: See my previous post re: being forced to sit quietly in our seats until everybody is done with the test.

Finance: Exam started at 12 pm. I finished around 12:15 pm and brought the test up to the teacher. Was asked if I please wouldn't mind sitting in my chair until 12:30, because if anybody was running late and came late to the exam, and I had already left, the teacher would face an "ethical dilemma" with administering the exam to the late person. Sigh.

Nutrition/Metabolism: Multiple choice test with about size 18 font. Apparently in the past people have complained about not being able to read the questions??

Neurobiology: 3 professors + 1 random upperclassman came into the exam room wearing black clothes and sunglasses, in some sort of strange Men In Black parody that absolutely nobody understood. Must have been one of those inside jokes, but we all missed the memo.

I survived (we all knew I would)

Exam #2 (the oh-so-dreaded parasitology) is over and was mostly successful. It was easier than anticipated (thank goodness), and so I ended up doing just about the right amount of studying.

The annoying part, though, was finishing the exam in 20 minutes and being forced to sit quietly in my seat for the remaining 30 minutes of the period, until everybody was done with their exams. I hadn't been made to do that since high school. Rather than creating a less disruptive atmosphere, without people getting up and leaving every few minutes, it had the opposite effect, resulting in whispered conversations, covert games of hangman, plenty of doodling, working on crossword puzzles from the newspaper, and a number of annoying noises made by 134 restless vet students with better things to be doing.

So far so good

Neuro exam is over (only took 50 minutes, ha) and it definitely went well.

Now, 2 hours of studying for parasitology, plus an hour of studying during finance, plus another hour during Biology of Disease. Let's be perfectly honest, nobody in PVM 2012 is paying any attention in our regular classes today.

12 hours

Just under 12 hours to go until the kick-off of The Day Of Very Alarming Exams.

Our first neuro exam starts at 9 am. Normally we have an hour of lecture at 9 then two hours of lab from 10 till noon. So that means that we have 3 hours allotted to take this exam tomorrow. Here's hoping it doesn't take quite that long... (To be perfectly honest, I'm not all that worried about this exam... I like neuro, and I pretty much "get" it. Plus all the neuro profs are repeats from last semester, so I know how they'll write their exam questions.)

But our first parasitology exam is at 2 pm tomorrow. If you've read anything on this blog in the last 4 weeks, you probably know how I feel about parasitology. This exam will cover ectoparasites (ticks, mites, lice, fleas, and flies) plus some protozoans (apicomplexans, flagellates, and hemoprotozoans). Frankly, it could go either way... either the exam is easier than we've all been anticipating, or it's worse than our scariest nightmares...

We all figure there really aren't two worse exams to put together on the same day.

In other news, last week's nutrition/metabolism exam went phenomenally well, and I'm feeling pretty good about Friday's finance exam too, although we don't have our scores yet. I'm about 4 chapters into "Fast Food Nation" and starting to think my way through my book report, though it's not due for another 6 weeks or so. Parasitology quizzes, neurology practice cases, and assignments in writing class have all gone well. So stay tuned for what I hope will be positive news after tomorrow's trials and tribulations!

Turns out...

From http://www.icanhascheezburger.com/, this totally cracked me up:

Quote of the Day

Professor in Biology of Disease:

"Free radicals are sorta like freshman male college students. They are as promiscuous as they are allowed to be... they'll react with just about anything."

I wish I'd taken Latin

I remember in high school, my dad trying to convince me to take some classes in Latin. ("Yeah, right, Dad, how totally boring and useless would that be! Latin is, like, dead!")

Well, it turns out he might have been right... veterinary medicine (actually, all medicine) is full of organisms, body parts, diseases, and adjectives derived from Latin word roots. And it sure helps to remember some of these many, many medical words if you can make some association in your mind with what the word actually means, or where it came from.

Our gross anatomy instructor was really great about helping us with this sort of thing. She taught us almost all of the common roots that indicate certain regions of the body (e.g. "metr" refers to the uterus, so "metritis" is inflammation of the uterus). She also taught us some of the prefixes and suffixes, like endo, ecto, epi, etc.

So we were able to muddle our way through gross anatomy and remember pretty much all the terms we needed to know.

Then comes parasitology. (I know, isn't this like my twelfth post about parasitology this semester?? I'll try to cut back.)

Parasitology is full of fun names like:

Amblyomma maculatum
Boophilus microplus
Psoroptes cuniculi
Ornithonyssus sylviarum
Ctenocephalides canis
Gasterophilus hemorrhoidalis (that one sounds charming, eh?)
Cochliomyia macellaria

Here's one from bacteriology, one of my new favorites:

Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae

It turns out that most of these names are probably derived from Latin roots that actually mean something, and may in fact relate to something important about that particular bug.

But since I never took Latin, I have to use my meager knowledge gleaned from miscellaneous sources, along with my creativity, to help me remember.

For example:

Rhipicephalus sanguineus.

Okay, I know "cephalo" refers to the head. The Spanish word for blood is "sangre," which sort of sounds like the first part of sanguineus. So we've got "head blood." The start of the first word, Rhipicephalus, actually sounds like "Rip his." Combine that to "Rip his -- head -- blood." Well, yeah, if you rip his head off, that'll be bloody. Voila!

Want to remember what animal Rhipicephalus sanguineus (a tick) uses as its host? Well, ripping someone's head off and getting bloody... that could be a pitbull!* Pitbulls are dogs, and Rhipicephalus sanguineus lives on dogs! Double voila!

That is merely one of many, many examples of why, when talking to a recently accepted future freshman vet student last week, I advised her to learn some Latin in her free time...

*Re: pitbulls. No, they are not mean dogs that rip people's heads off and get bloody. But if I'm scrambling to come up with a memory device, I certainly won't exclude false stereotypes!

How to tell you're in the 2nd semester of vet school

• Markedly less stress. After all, we all passed the first semester, so we ought to be able to do it again.
• Nobody giggles when the professor says diarrhea, or virtually any word related to genitalia or reproduction.
• It's been beaten into you that sick animals have "clinical signs," not "symptoms."
• Instead of peeing, pooping, and throwing up, you talk about urinating, defecating, and vomition.
• Your vocabulary is full of acronyms like AVMA, CVMA, SAVMA, SCAVMA, EEE, WEE, WNV, EPM, CDV, CNS, PNS, ANS, ECF, CSF, ECM, DIC (2 completely unrelated meanings), PCR, AIHA, AAHA, VDL, VTH, VIN, and those are only the ones I could think of in about 90 seconds.
• At a moment's notice, you can recite what CVMBS stands for.
• You can, with a marginal level of confidence, find a half dozen specific locations in the teaching hospital.
• Everybody is so used to cutting up cadavers and sitting in classrooms all day that the opportunity to interact with a real, live dog is a bit surreal.

How to tell if you're turning into a grown-up

Sometimes I feel like I'm just getting older and older...

So I thought of some ways to tell if you might be turning into a grown-up (okay, besides the obvious things like being married, owning property, and being enrolled in a program where you'll be called "Doctor" in merely 3 years and 3 months):

1. You listen to NPR every day. And you actually enjoy it. In fact, you can name just about anybody in Obama's cabinet and specify what tax-related error they're being scolded for.
2. You realize that you look forward to getting up at 5:30 every morning to exercise.
3. You understand why your parents always said that going to the grocery store together was a good date.
4. When class is over at 1 pm on Fridays, instead of going home to get a jump start on the weekend, you stick around school to study for 3 hours.
5. You are learning all about mortgages, property taxes, and car insurance.
6. For the first time in 5 years, you're not watching the new season of American Idol oh-so-compulsively. In fact, it's been on for a month and you haven't even watched a single episode! What's scarier is, you don't even miss it!

Anniversary

As of Sunday (Feb. 8), CLH and I have known each other for 3 years. Isn't it funny how when you look back at things like that, you think simultaneously, "Haven't I known you forever?" and "Weren't we just dating?"

It's been a great 3 years and we're excited for many more. :-)

Kitty pictures!

When I posted about Johnny & Simon yesterday, I meant to throw in some cute pictures... so here they are!

Here are a couple of shots of them sleeping in weird places. This was back in our apartment in Arizona, we were getting the carpets cleaned one day so everything small got piled onto the couch, and the cats thought that was just a fantastic place to play and sleep.



































And here is a cute shot of them snuggling together, really, really close, which they still love to do.

My babies are growing up... sniff

Johnny & Simon will be a year old in May. Wow! They still seem like naughty little kittens sometimes - but I guess they are pretty much still teenagers.

They are slowly maturing, though. Finally, after over a year of living with us, Johnny is almost to the point where he can eat next to Simon unsupervised.

(Note: If Johnny had his way, he would be a grotesquely obese cat and he'd be perfectly happy about it. It is only through strict monitoring of his food intake that he remains just mildly overweight.)

So Johnny has a food bowl, and Simon has a food bowl. They've both eaten all kinds of food since we've had them, but now Johnny is on a prescription hypoallergenic diet (= costs $$) and Simon is eating whatever I can get for free. The deal with Johnny's diet is that we're testing him for a food allergy, so if he eats anything besides his special food, that can mess up the results.

Previously, Johnny would gobble his food (think about the "Hungry Hungry Hippo" game), and promptly head over to Simon's bowl for dessert. When they first came to live with us, one of them would always get locked in his carrier while they both ate.

Eventually we got to the point where, if you were standing right next to them, brushing your teeth or something, Johnny would just sort of mope around pathetically after he finished eating, but not dive into Simon's food unless you turned your back.

NOW, you can actually leave the room while the cats are eating, and Johnny will finish his food and go off by himself after about 80% of his meals. (The other 20% of the time, he really wants Simon's food. But if he goes toward the other bowl, and you catch him, he'll cut it out if you say "no.")

The only issue is that Johnny has apparently decided that any food that falls out of Simon's bowl is fair game for him if he can reach it with his paw and pull it closer to him. It's pretty cute to watch. If you're standing there, he will simultaneously look up at you (with an "Am I going to get in trouble?" look) and reach his paw out to grab the food. And yes, he always gets in trouble...

Haiku!

Last semester, anatomy was pretty much our toughest class, and it was the anatomy exams that caused the most stress. The profs knew this, so they tried to lighten things up for us on exam days. We'd meet half an hour or an hour before the exam started to do something fun and help us relax. Before one exam, the course coordinator had us write anatomy-related haiku, then she put together a powerpoint presentation so we could all read each other's.

Anyway, I was just reminiscing about the haiku this morning... here are the ones I submitted:

No more 3 hour tests!
Can we please be graded on
Our haiku instead?

Zygomatic arch
Get a saw and hack it off
Isn't gross lab fun?

Embryology:
Smith* thinks it is important.
We do the crossword.

Oculamotor...
Can't remember how to spell
Occulomotor...

Oh, cheiloschisis
Another fusion failure
Don't call it harelip

Smith* gave us "the look"
Better put a star by that -
On the next exam

*Smith = fake name for anatomy professor. :-)

The grossest word I've learned so far this semester

Caseopurulent, meaning cheesy pus.

Redneck

I heard a story on NPR the other day about this black guy who got wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman in Texas in the 80s. The way NPR told the story, it was like really, really obvious that this guy was not the rapist, but the police implied to the victim that they had evidence that the guy had done it, and kind of talked her into thinking it was him after all. So he got convicted in large part on her testimony, because there wasn't much evidence at all that it was him.

Anyway... the best part of the story was the name of the redneck district attorney who doggedly prosecuted (wrongfully) this poor innocent guy:

Jim Bob Darnell.

Doesn't get much better than that!

A pat on the back for me

Today I took action on behalf of the Class of 2012 and threw away the remains of the huge sushi party tray that have been sitting in the communal refrigerator, untouched, for the last 2 1/2 weeks. There's a mostly-eaten birthday cake that's been in there for the same amount of time, and if it's still there on Monday, I'll be throwing that away too.

How to tell if you've been studying parasitology too much

I woke up this morning feeling vaguely creepy-crawly but unable to pin down exactly why.

About 15 minutes later, it hit me: I remembered the very vivid and utterly disturbing dream I had last night.

For some reason, I had a hamster that needed to be euthanized, so I brought it to a vet's office. While I was waiting in the lobby (I'm bypassing some of the bizarre stuff related to the hamster), I mentioned that my back had been hurting lately (which it hasn't).

The vet (who happened to be my physiology / biology of disease professor) came out and said he could fix my back, he just needed to stick a needle in it. So I decided that sounded like a good plan.

I have this completely realistic memory of him injecting a bunch of lidocaine (local anesthetic) into my back (complete with the unpleasant sting), and then the totally unrealistic but still vivid memory of getting injected with so much lidocaine that it made a big bubble on my back that he had to flatten out and spread it around to the rest of my back. (Okay, local anesthetic doesn't work like that. We humans don't have that much loose skin on our backs...)

Midway through the process, I asked him what the stuff he was going to pull out with the needle would look like. (No, I didn't seem to care at all what it actually was.) He said it would look like a lot of black bubbles.

So I got jabbed with a giant needle (I'm remembering it as being like 1/4 inch wide) and the vet sucked out a bunch of, well, stuff that looked like black bubbles.

In the end, I deciphered that the black bubbles were in fact little bits and pieces of Cuterebra larvae, which are these really disgusting larvae that migrate through an animal's body and end up in the subcutaneous fat along the back, where they build a little cyst and cut a breathing hole in the skin on the animal's back and grow to about 1 1/4 inches long. (They are black and huge and gross. And it doesn't look anything like black bubbles when you try to get rid of them. It just looks like enormous black worms sitting in your skin.)

My conclusion? I've been studying parasitology plenty. Time to study neurobiology until I start having nightmares about facial paralysis and absent pupillary light reflexes...

Joke of the day, Vol. 4

(Unlike most of my awesome jokes, which come from string cheese wrappers, this one started as a clue in the crossword puzzle and I decided it could be turned into a lame joke.)

Q: What's the best clothing for an attorney?

A: A lawsuit!

It can't be February

Because I'm in Colorado and we were forecasted to have a high of 68 degrees today...

(Helloooo, global warming!)

Panic, only 2 weeks in!

We've been in class for just over 2 weeks, and obviously haven't had any exams yet, but the panic is starting to seep in... usually I wouldn't expect to start feeling quite this worried until the first set of exams was looming.

Initially I thought this semester would be great, what with getting out of class at 3 pm every day. But then I realized that while last semester we had labs scheduled till 4 on Mon/Thurs/Fri, it was only very rarely that we actually needed to stay the whole time. Plus we got done with class at 2 on Tuesday and 1 on Wednesday. But now with real classes in the afternoon instead of labs, we definitely stay till 3 every day.

That might be okay, because we have an hour-long break for lunch every day, when you can be productive and study if you can find a place to get away from all of the partiers in the cubes. However, I am so clever and decided to take the next business class (finance), which meets MWF during the lunch hour.

Fridays are still pretty cool. Next Friday we'll have our first lab (a.k.a. the first actual vet school class on a Friday). So on Fridays I can sleep in till 8 or so, work out and shower, have a leisurely brunch, and get to the cubes in time to do some studying before finance at noon, +/- more studying after finance. The only problem with that plan is the motivation to not sleep till 10:30 am, and to actually stay and study when I could be going home to laze around for the rest of the day...

Unexpectedly, I think the most stressful class this semester is/will be parasitology. It should theoretically be an interesting, useful class, but so far it just seems like a bunch of useless rote memorization. We have, say 11 species of ticks, 12 species of mites, X species of lice (both chewing lice and sucking lice, hurray), X species of fleas, X species of flies.... etc, etc, etc. And for each species we need to memorize:

* The proper name (e.g. Ixodes scapularis)
* The common name (e.g. black-legged tick)
* The distribution (e.g. East coast and SE U.S.)
* The life cycle (e.g. 2-3 years to go from egg to adult)
* The hosts (e.g. 3 hosts: 1st = lizard/small rodent, 2nd = larger rodent/dog/human, 3rd = larger animal/deer/dog/human)
* The disease-causing microorganisms that it can transmit (e.g. Borrelia burgdorferi, Anaplasma phagocytophilium)

Repeat for every species of tick, mite, louse, flea, fly, etc.

The thing is, many of these ectoparasites only live in a particular region of the country (or have totally been eradicated in the U.S.). Once we move somewhere to settle permanently, I'll figure out what parasites are endemic to that area, and I'll get to know them pretty well. If there's anything I forget, well, that's why they make parasitology textbooks and reference books and that's why you keep one in your office. It sort of reminds me of having to memorize the atomic structure of all 20 amino acids in undergrad biochemistry, or having to memorize the 1st 25 elements on the periodic table in high school. Why??? You will never be anywhere that you have to know the atomic structure of aspartic acid and you'll have no way to look it up.

So I feel like I'm being forced to spend a significant amount of my time studying for parasitology when there are other really important things I should be focusing on, like neuro and nutrition and biology of disease.

Fortunately parasitology is only half of the course - in awhile we'll get to have virology instead. That'll be the same sort of thing, but hopefully not quite as intense.

My brain is full... if you want any info about fleas to stay in my brain, some of the tick info is going to have to come out!


parasite = stressful
bacterio = starting to

Silence! Frenzied, Unclean Spirit

Some text to an oh-so-cheerful hymn we sang in church last Sunday:

"Silence! Frenzied, unclean spirit," cried God's healing, Holy One.
"Cease your ranting! Flesh can't bear it. Flee as night before the sun."
At Christ's voice the demon trembled, from its victim madly rushed,
While the crowd that was assembled stood in wonder, stunned and hushed.

And here's my favorite, verse 2:

Christ, the demons are still thriving in the grey cells of the mind:
Tyrant voices, shrill and driving, twisted thoughts that grip and bind,
Doubts that stir the heart to panic, fears distorting reason's sight,
Guilt that makes our loving frantic, dreams that cloud the soul with fright.

And verse 3 is more cheerful about how Jesus can fix us.

Vet students always ask good questions

In parasitology class, discussing the parasitic Eimeria species:

Prof: Eimeria species commonly infect young calves. Let's talk about the clinical signs you would see with a severe infection. You'd see projectile, bloody diarrhea with mucus. You'd see tenesmus... do you all know what tenesmus is?

Class: No.

Prof: Tenesmus means straining to defecate.

(Class compulsively writes that down.)

Prof: The other signs you'd see are inappetance, dehydration, and weight loss.

(Two students have raised their hands.)

Prof (to student #1): Yes?

Student #1: I'm just wondering.... how can you be straining to defecate if you're having projectile diarrhea?

(Student #1 and the rest of the class and the instructor all start laughing.)

Professor answers question. [Answer = it has something to do with the nerve endings that control the urge to defecate, and the nerves don't "know" that you are having diarrhea so they still tell your brain that you need to defecate.]

Prof: Wasn't there another question?

Student #2: Yep, that was my question, too.

Raucous laughter ensues.