Keep moving forward

Hi there; Birdie here!

I have now completed seven weeks of classes, but it feels like at least twice that. I was just home for Mardi Gras break as recently as Tuesday, but mostly that just served to throw me off...somehow I was still convinced I was coming back on Monday. I'm really angry about the orthopedics test I took this morning. It was at least half short answer, a lot of which involved questions with 4 blanks or "circle 5 things" or list three...yet none of them were worth more than two points. And the exam is worth 50 points overall, which means there's less of a cushion to get any wrong. I really don't know why they didn't just make it 100 points. And that's not even to mention how confusing some of the questions were...at least I found out that I did well in derm, and kept up my grade in urinary (despite how I felt walking out of the final).

I'm also stressing pretty hard about everything coming up. I'm leaving for Washington, D.C. next Sunday, but I still need to buy some more professional clothes and figure out when I'm taking the derm final, and that's in addition to the 20+ lecture exam in farm animal next Wednesday. It's not that it's hard material, but I've never done anything with farm animals so I know approximately none of it, and it's a TON of information. It would be a lot even if I didn't have to deal with derm, but I'm not sure whether I'm taking that final early (as in, Friday) or late (as in, right before the orthopedics exam). Missing exams in vet school is the worst. They're already crammed on top of each other, there's not really room for much more of it!

I did manage to make my riding lessons these past 2 Thursdays, at least. I've been riding a mare named Nora who used to be a Western pleasure horse and is pretty new to jumping. I like her, and she has lovely smooth gaits! Last week (after 2 weeks off), I had some trouble keeping her going. I did a lot better this week, though, especially in canter transitions (which we worked on a lot). We're also working on bending lines with her. This week we had a bending line where she had to change leads over the second jump (as well as get the correct lead over the first jump), and we weren't very good at it, largely because she doesn't know what she's doing. Honestly, I'm happy I got her to canter out every time I asked for it. Next week I'll do even better. I have to be pretty determined to get to my riding lessons now, though. Last week I studied pretty much every waking hour that I wasn't in class, including the day I took another exam, for my anesthesia final. Currently I'm holding on to the fact that there's only 6 weeks until spring break, and I'm traveling for part of 2 of them. Which means that at least a couple of the others I'll be scrambling to catch up, so I'm sure it will pass impossibly quickly and also take forever to do it--that's vet school.

Of course I'm also determined to keep up with my reading. I finished The Eighty-Dollar Champion and was actually pretty disappointed in it. It was exactly what I don't like about nonfiction: too much history, not enough story. It didn't really make me want to read my other horse books yet, so I haven't. I'm currently reading my year-book (that is, "A book published the year you were born"), but I paused in the middle to read Dragons Deal. I happened on it in Barnes & Noble the day before Mardi Gras, and it happened to be about a Mardi Gras krewe...so naturally I immediately read it in two days. I'm still hoping to read Animals in Translation before I hear Temple Grandin speak at symposium, but I'm not sure what it will count for in the challenge. Regardless, I'll probably read it on one of my plane rides...I have 3 of them before I want to have it read.

The alligator wetlab was pretty cool. I did hit the vein, but apparently "between scales" means between rows of scales, not between scales within a row (even though I'm pretty sure I was between scales, and I did get a flash of blood). I kind of failed at hitting the sinus behind the skull to give any drugs, though. Or rather, when I hit it the gator flailed and broke the needle or pulled it off the syringe or similar. Our alligator was 44 and a half inches long, I believe--three and a half feet. The necropsy was really interesting. Their testicles are kind of long structures almost at midline near the spine, and their kidneys are knobby little masses of tissue. Also, apparently reptiles have pigmented membranes, so fascia and other such connective tissue can just kind of be blue for no particular reason. So that's good to know. In addition to our wetlab, the gators had some specimens taken for a research project someone's working on. We had a really good turn out--26 people or so out of 30 spots, and everyone who couldn't make it gave us warning. Unfortunately our path club president wasn't feeling well and couldn't be there, and after all the work she put into planning it, too! But at least after all that work, it was a success.

We're working on planning our multihead microscope wetlabs for path club now: one histology, one cytology, and one correlation, with the first one next week. I'm also doing another wetlab tomorrow, this one with surgery club. Tomorrow I'll get to practice spays/neuters! We had the lunch meeting intro lecture yesterday, and the talk about ligation made my look at my notes from symposium last year since I went to a lecture on that topic. Unfortunately, my notes are kind of hard to follow. I don't know the suture patterns well enough to understand them, so the drawing doesn't really help unless I see it step by step. Still, maybe I'll look at it tomorrow so I at least have some idea how to do a circumferential and a three-clamp method. I'm pretty excited that I'll get to practice something I know I'm going to do in my career! I'm sure I'll learn a lot tomorrow about spay/neuter surgeries and also about surgery in general (we still haven't started our surgery class...despite being halfway through orthopedics).

Every time I look at my last blog post, it's cute how I think I will stop having so many things at once, ever. After spring break, maybe, when electives start. Until then, I'll just try to enjoy the mess of things I've got besides school.