Welcome to Third Year!

Hi there; Birdie here!

Hello, readers, if I still have any readers left after several months of hiatus (or if I had any in the first place)! I am now one week into my third year of vet school, with only one semester + one month to go until I start clinics, which is both awesome and scary. I've already started looking for externships, and have one penciled in, but two other places I've talked to won't have dates for 2016 until September, so I have to wait a little while. For all of my classmates who didn't seek out the schedule and rules about externships during the summer, we're having our first meeting about phase II scheduling on Tuesday. I'm not really sure when we have to turn in our rankings for what rotations we want when...further updates as events warrant.

So far we've started Business Management, Equine, Critical Care, Surgery & Anesthesia (as in, the one where we actually do surgery), Clinical Skills lab, and small animal Medicine. Tomorrow we add Ophthalmology, too. And that's just in the first two weeks! I really value the business class, and I think what we're learning is important, but I don't care for the person teaching it or the way they present the material. I did rather enjoy putting my bright-orange-with-bronze-tips nails blatantly on the desk in front of my classmates when he said to stick to natural colored or no nail polish and "save the red for date night." Unfortunately, I had to take off that nail polish (which I'd just put on btw) that night for surgery lab the next day. I had my very first surgery lab on Tuesday, which left very little time for preparation. I was absolutely terrified during the last hour of class on Monday when they explained the high standards of Surgery. It was nowhere near as bad as I expected, though. We had typed up our procedure, and we taped it to the cabinets so we could have a reference. And we had at least three different clinicians come and talk us through various parts of the procedure. We did very little of the abdominal exploratory that was nominally the goal of the lab, but we did spay our cadaver dog. My lab partners each did an ovary and I took care of the uterine body. I have a bet with one of my lab partners about whether our surgery report will be acceptable or unacceptable (the only two grades on that scale). I think it will be unacceptable because he'll want us to edit it so that we can know exactly how to do it right before the individual reports from  our live surgeries which are actually graded--but we'll see. We also had lab for Equine, but it wasn't anything exciting this week. Well, there was a live horse, which would be more exciting if I still didn't have riding lessons; but I did, the day before. We did learn how to tie several knots, though: a tail tie, bowline, clover hitch, and their version of a halter tie. Maybe later labs will be more exciting.

Our schedule is pretty weird this semester. We picked groups for surgery, which also apply for Equine lab and now for Clinical Skills (it originally wasn't, but that teacher changed it). The groups rotate such that on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, only some of us have class at given times (after the first 2 hours). Some days I don't have class after 10 am! I'm trying a new way of organizing my agenda this year to keep up with stuff especially in those blank spaces where I don't have class: basically as a weekly to-do list, color-coded for when things are due.

This was the first weekend of the school year, which means Homes for Hounds and the year's first Spay Day. On Friday, I went to the Christian Veterinary Fellowship ice cream social. We had an interesting talk about what "born again" means--I'm still not really sure what to make of it. I'm on their email list now, so I guess I'm part of CVF. I had most of the same team for Homes for Hounds this year, with one switch. I got there early, but went back home for last year's apron when I learned they didn't have enough this year for everyone. In the meantime, two of my group members worked on assembling the doghouse, which turned out to be defective--as I understand it, the holes on the front piece didn't line up right. And my third group member was stuck in huge storms as she drove back, so she got there about 2 hours late. All of which means we had a lot of disadvantages, and it didn't help that I 1) put rather a lot of detail into my drawing and 2) was the only one drawing (last year Brooke did one side). We finished most of the painting in the last 30 minutes, and we had to ignore some of the detail and just paint over it, but honestly I'm super proud that we finished at all. It didn't look as good as it could have, but we had an awesome concept and we got it across--and we actually had paint on all of it, which I consider a win!

The front of our Home for Hounds this year

It's Mardi Gras themed! Every dog on the float is a different breed, but they all had to be brown silhouettes because we ran out of time.

Note that the dogs on this float are wearing cat masks.

Spay Day today was INSANE. We did 237 cats--more than ever before, and the rescue group has agreed we won't do that many again! Luckily we also had a ton of people show up to help! I started out working anesthesia, as I typically do. But now I'm a third year--and I got to go to the neuter table! First I watched a classmate, who had been on the table longer, remove one testicle, and then I did the other one under her direction. I was offered to have someone observe and talk me through my next cat, but I spent 3 Sundays this summer at the shelter near the airport working on high volume neuters (and two spays, even! Well, like half a spay and 3/4 of a spay) where I learned very nearly the same procedure, so I felt like I had it under control. I felt really cool signing my name for the neuters and when first years helping out called me ma'am and assumed I know what I'm doing. Nine and a half of the cats that got neutered are thanks to me! I also got to meet a bunch of the first years, which was fun. But all in all, we didn't get out until 5...and we started at 8, so that's a long day!

Before I sign off, I just want to say a little about how I spent my summer. My research project was more complicated than we expected--my mentors kept adding comparisons, the machine we were supposed to be validating gave us trouble, and the part we expected to finish in 2 weeks still isn't done because unlike in the previous study (where they did finish in a few weeks), we needed a day between each dog to sterilize the only two transducers we had. Despite the fact that research is ongoing (and I might be able to help some in my blank spaces of no lab, depending on when they're working on it), I was able to spend a week at home before school started, which was nice. Before that, though, I presented my research on a poster at the summer scholars symposium. This year, it was at UC Davis; they apologized for the heat but it was perfect, nice weather to me, especially compared to Louisiana! The symposium itself wasn't much fun. I did like presenting my poster (and owning my landing, where I was the only poster presented at that time between two sets of stairs and a doorway). But other than that, they basically never stopped talking at us! I really disliked how on the first night, at a wine-and-appetizers thing set up like a meet-and-greet (you know, to meet all the people from other schools who are also presenting, as makes sense) they had several people talk at us for five minutes each while a lady went around SHHHH!ing anyone who dared to talk. I could see them giving a welcome talk, but it needed to take less than an hour and/or be set up as a thing where we listen to speakers instead of a thing where we meet the students from other schools.

The unofficial parts were great, though. Our LSU contingient hung out every night, whether at a picnic table near the not-meet-and-greet, in the common room of the dorm where we were staying, or out at the bars downtown. And one morning a handful of us skipped the first set of lectures to have a crepe brunch and walk around downtown Davis. We went to the farmers' market that happened to be across the street from our crepe place, stopped at a store to buy Davis T shirts (and I got olive oil for my mentors as a thank you gift--apparently Davis olive oil is a thing, or at least trying to be), and petted a bunch of dogs because so many people brought their dogs out. That was probably my favorite part of the trip. I wasn't sure during parts of the summer, especially when we were having so much trouble with everything, but I think I'm glad I did the research. Especially if I get a publication or two out of it! I'm also relieved that even though the project isn't finished, I don't have any real committment to work on it beyond the summer. I spent a lot of the summer worrying about how I'd manage to work on it while in school, and I'm glad to learn I didn't have to worry.