Crazy busy

Hi there; Birdie here!

I am now two weeks from being 1/4 a DVM. Pathology final next Tuesday, then bacteriology on Friday, and then I'm done with first year!

On the minus side, I got my third and final summer rejection, for the Banfield summer job program. I'm really not excited about sending out emails and talking to clinics and maybe thinking about trying to get a paying job. But honestly I'd only be available for like 10 weeks, and no one's gonna hire me for that when I was more available last summer and still got rejected for that reason. Really quite disappointed about the whole not making money thing.

Integrative med was a pretty cool class. I really liked having labs every day. I don't think I learned that much useful stuff in it though since you pretty much need a whole certification course to be able to do any of that stuff. I'm not really sure whether I'm up for that. Some of the stuff was interesting (like the community practice day, and the massage lab was great since I can actually just do that on my own pets), but some of it was a lot more detail about traditional Chinese medicine and why it's great than I need since I'm not going to practice it. What I got out of that bit was that it's a thing I can refer for. I'm starting my other elective today, and we already got an assignment--to bring in two articles for class. I'm pretty excited about this class, and hoping there will be more I get out of it to actually use in practice.

Remember how last Friday was the dance I decided not to go to? Well, my good friend decided not to go too (her boyfriend had hurt his foot and wasn't really up for dress shoes/standing up all night at a dance), so I spent the evening playing video games at there house, which was a ton of fun. I enjoyed it much more than I would have enjoyed the drunkfest that the dance was.

Saturday we had the feline necropsy wetlab. Once again I am not good at necropsy wetlabs. I'm totally fine when I'm doing it, but when we're just standing around in front of a dead animal talking about it I start feeling not-good and need to sit down. It didn't even smell that bad! It was cool though to actually do it. We worked in pairs, and the cat I was working on had multifocal tiny pale lesions in his liver that the residents said were probably parasite migration. We didn't see the same lesions in the kidneys, but they might have been there microscopically. We actually took out the brain this time (for the dog last semester, I took of the head but didn't get the brain out) and there now exists a picture of me triumphantly holding a cat brain. It might also be my officer picture for path club. Some other people were joking around and said that my partner wanted to keep the brain, so one of the residents actually put it in a bag with fixative for her to take home! I will admit, if I knew that was an option I might have asked to keep the brain. We're having our last multihead microscope wetlab tomorrow, and it's blood focused and we might even get to practice making blood smears.

Then Saturday night I went to a friend (and Pathfinder groupmate)'s birthday party. I made macaroni and cheese in "collaboration" with my neighbor friend, but then let her take credit for that (she didn't really, but I said she could) because I also made a coca-cola cake. I thought I was showing off with putting roses on it, but I got totally shown up by a cream cheese-chocolate covered strawberry cake, with cream-cheese filled chocolate-covered strawberries to go with it. It was a lot of fun and involved a lot of playing with kitties, and I only left early (right before they started playing Cards Against Humanity) because I got a text from my sister and went to meet her and her muppet. We hung out at a coffeeshop for a while before heading to a bar where they had some really cool firedancers. I was impressed. So basically that night was pretty great.

Sunday of course was Pathfinder day since I had the wetlab Saturday. I continued to be pretty useless in combat, but my alchemist character got to do some science! There were a couple of pools of water (one rimmed with skulls) that I dipped a series of things in to try and figure out what they did. I took samples, too. I'm still not sure what they did, actually (one cleaned stuff and the other just made stuff wet, but I'm convinced there's more to it). It was really fun, and we get to level up! It's a little higher optimization than I'm used to though and I didn't really like when the things I wanted (because they're cool) got shut down because they weren't practical enough. It's DnD--I can literally make magic fire, why do I have to be practical? Plus I thought the thing I wanted was a really good thing given the way our last adventure went. But whatever.

Monday there was a lab animal club meeting at lunch, which I attended because free food. The speaker was the first boarded lab animal vet I've met who I actually liked, but I was still kind of turned off by the way she talked about private practice as boring and kind of lesser. It annoys me when people promoting alternative vet med paths rag on private practice because that's what I want to do and there's nothing wrong with that...sometimes listening to them it's hard to remember that though.

Other than that I've basically been studying pathology, though last night I did make dinner for my study buddy and her boyfriend (plus her/kind of our since I hang out there all the time tutor). It was chicken and sausage jambalaya, and it was pretty awesome.

This weekend I was going to do the ultrasound thing, but...there were 3 timeslots, and they put me in the one that conflicts with Pathfinder. Since there's only 1 or 2 weekends left before summer and I'm not sure whether we'll play at all then, I picked that instead. There were like a dozen people ready to take my place though, so I don't mind. I'm not leaving them shorthanded (it's a volunteer/experience thing, kinda like spay day but with ultrasound CE as far as I can tell). I'm still doing an ophthamology wetlab on Sunday though! I'm kind of glad the ultrasound thing fell through, it would have been a lot for this weekend. Especially when I have to study for my 2 finals.