Spring break in pictures

Meet Spartacus! He is Mike's new fish.

I bought him for Mike so that he will have a pet when he goes to grad school and the Harv-monster comes to live with me!

He is also Chicago Cubs Colors

This is my little nephew dog Fletcher.

He is absolutely precious and one of Harvey's best friends

At first Harvey and Toby did not get along, but once Toby figured out Harvey was fun to play with, he staked out the couch and they had a blast!

This is Harvey being vicious

Harvey and Fletch being monitored by Toby

"What? We weren't even being loud and we were probably not gonna break anything"

Mike loves Fletch-man

I love my big cousin!

And she loves her mommy, I love her mommy too! They made us some absolutely fantastic dinner, yuuuuummmmy!

Toby is one handsome and shiny dog!

And a little kiss for Uncle Mike from the sweetest little nephew dog.

He's a brat, but I love him anyways I guess :-)

Even if his shirt is shiny

Yea....The people I surround myself with, and I picked the one with the marshmallows on his head, we aren't forced to be together!

Check it out!

Off to the right-hand side there is a list of a few blogs that I really like. Pioneer Woman is especially great and you may have seen her show on the food network!

And now it's been awhile...

I swear I don't know how time flies this quickly.

Actually that's not true, would y'all like to know exactly how it happens?

Well there is a giant finals week of awful
Then you dog-sit for you and your boyfriend's dog
You spend a very short quick evening with your boyfriend while he is in town for grad school interviews
Then you go for a long 4 day weekend to West Lafayette Indiana
Then you have a week of 4 tests
Then you drive 8 hrs to Ohio
Then you spend all day visiting with people
Then you sleep.

At that is pretty much the gist of what you have missed in my life.

But to go into a little more detail....

I was at Purdue University for a symposium. The school gives us 2 days off to go to the SAVMA (Student American Veterinary Medicine Association) symposium which was held at Purdue this year. It was a very busy weekend. Myself and 2 friends drove down on Thursday, went to the opening ceremonies and then to the bar where they had set up dinner, dancing, and drinks. I think if we didn't know the whole time that we had 4 tests coming up the next week, it could have been a little more fun focused. But either way we had an absolute blast. We woke up early the next morning, attempted to catch the shuttle, which was taking 40 min instead of 20, and eventually made it to the bus to Chicago. 3 of my friends and I were lucky enough to get signed up for a day trip to The Shedd Aquarium which is one of my favorite places on the planet. We also got to see the whole veterinary clinic and stuff, which isn't very big because they do most stuff tank side. It was still another step in hopefully, at some point, maybe, figuring out what I want to do with my degree. But the coolest part about the Shedd was that one of my friends had never seen a body of water as big the lake. It was so cool watching her get all excited about it.

We also got dinner or lunch served to us most nights and we spent most of Saturday listening to lectures. They always had about 10 lectures going on, each in a different category of veterinary medicine. They had shelter med, exotics, behavior, forensics, food animals, production medicine, all kinds of different lectures, so many that you feel like you were gonna miss something just by picking one over another.

There was also a big closing gala and I got to hear Temple Grandin speak. If you don't know who she is you can go to her website here. But it was really amazing and I bought her book which she signed for me. All around another great vet med experience!

And I'm pretty darn sure I did ok on all my exams that week, yay!

But now I am chilling on the bf's futon, watching Felicity (show from the late 90s, wikipedia it here!) and thinking about maybe getting dressed at some point...or maybe not. Luckily I don't have to until the dog decides he absolutely has to go outside. Viva Spring Break!

Zoo trip

I have a lot to write about, but I'll try to at least tell the story of my behind-the-scenes tour of the Kansas City zoo before it gets to far from my memory.

The vet who runs their veterinary hospital is flat out amazing.

I don't really know any other way to describe such an awesome guy, and we had a magical and very informative trip to the zoo. He took us through the entire hospital, showing us all the equipment and drugs, telling stories about everything and anything, making hilarious jokes about Kansas, and challenging us to use the knowledge we have.

We got to see the way they use thermal imaging to detect bruises in thick skinned animals such as elephants; you can see blood vessels running to a wound in her eat that are completely invisible to the naked eye. We saw radiographs of cheetahs, giraffes, and even bluegill and talked through the anatomy and evolutionary history of each.

<p>But best of all, we got to try using the blow gun to dart a fake deer. By blow dart I do mean the type where you blow into the end and the dart with a little tassel silently glides through the air and hopefully hits its target. Dr. zoovet can hit a house cat in the hip from about 50-100 ft away. Just hearing the way the vet care is performed was riveting. He did the first root canal ever done on an elephant and told us that story as well as stories of elephant births and broken legs in little toads.

After letting us ask him anything we wanted and listening to how personally he takes each and every death of an animal in care, it was easy to see that this is the kind of vet I want to be. To work 21 years in the same job and still be excited by each procedure and to still take it as a personal failure each time an animal dies, that is certainly the gold standard of a veterinarian, at least in my eyes.

After the tour he took us to the barn when many of the hoof-stock are kept, including the giraffes! The large male giraffe, Murphy, leaned his head down to the window of the big wooden door and inspected each of us as we walked by, his big brown eyes so interested as if he was wondering "why didn't you grow more than that?" His head was HUGE. A good 3 ft tall at least and he was just so nosy. Walking past his stall, we then passed the females and the two babies. One of the babies peeked her head around the edge of the divider and watched us file past. We also ostriches, okapis, and spring bok.

going behind the scenes makes you feel a little like royalty, but even when we were just walking around the zoo we had such a great experience. The keeper by the orangutans told us the story of the little baby and how he got to help raise her until a surrogate mother was found. The polar bear was flipping somersaults in his pool and the keeper told us about how the bear would be getting a girlfriend when he hit sexual maturity at around age 7. It was just such a priceless look into a part of veterinary medicine which I may never get to work closely with.

It makes me even more excited to get a behind the scenes tour of the Shedd Aquarium's animal hospital when I go to SAVMA symposium next weekend!

VRSP updates

Did I tell y'all about my dinner at Dr. VRSPs house? Ok her name isn't really Dr. VRSP, but she's the doctor I'm gonna do research with, so it'll work.
So I finally get to her house after some problems with directions and it is this beautiful farm house. Huge and from the 1800's. She has completely redone the house and it is just amazing. Flat out amazing.

But she has made us this huge mexican taco dinner and it is me and like 10ish other people. Phd students, masters students, internal medicine residents, other clinicians, everyone was definitely older/wiser/ not a vet student. So I was understandably nervous. It was a little like going to a doctor you have seen on a TLC special. You know their names, you have spoken to them in passing, and you know they know a lot. I have worked in the ICU with some of these people, but I am in the background helping, I'm not up in their business or having meaningful conversations. It is like meeting a celebrity only way nerdier.

But we chat about animals and pets and how vets are not great vets to their own animals. We either ignore stuff or freak out about everything or basically do all the things normal pet owners do, except we should know better. I had a great time with these people and it was so much fun.

Then we got to discussing the paper. The paper was an article about a group of experts who got together to talk about the current protocols for Sepsis (this is the definition according to the Mayo Clinic - Sepsis occurs when chemicals released into the bloodstream to fight the infection trigger inflammation throughout the body. This inflammation creates microscopic blood clots that can block nutrients and oxygen from reaching organs, causing them to fail. If sepsis progresses to septic shock, blood pressure drops dramatically and the person may die.). In other words it's when a really big infection affects your entire body. But this paper was using research to suggest different treatments by citing many different studies that say it will work instead of just one doctor's opinion. It was pretty cool, but....

...the coolest part was that I actually understood the physiology behind the processes. I understood why a treatment might be suggested, why it wouldn't work, why it only works sometimes. I mean I don't know enough to be able to offer up my own opinions just by reading, but when the clinicians are talking about it, I totally understand. This was a huge moment for me. It made me feel like I was going somewhere and that I could have opinions and a valid understanding of medicine already.
It was unbelievable.
Remember when you rode a bike for the first time without training wheels?
This was me gliding down a hill, no training wheels, all by myself :-)

Minor Mental Breakdowns Mended with Meals

Yea, this week has been really rough.
I had a minor mental breakdown about my anatomy test the night before and then one of Harvey's teeth fell out for no apparent reason and I kind of lost it... Just a little. I was giggle-crying. There's a chance I was a little overtired...Just a chance...
And yesterday's anatomy exam did not go well. I don't think it really went well for most people, but it was a bit of a horror film of a test.
Luckily it was over and we went out for lunch! But after lunch we immediately started Block 4. Because technically our new block started yesterday, we just had to take the last test of Block 3 first. It was a little rough, but it is so amazingly nice to start new classes. I cannot even explain the joy of putting microanatomy and nutrition behind me. It was a joyous occasion and I would have done a little dance had I not been so knock-down,drag-out tired.

Speaking of a new block....
Here is my schedule for the next 8 weeks!
I start everyday at 9 am, no early 8am days! But I still have anatomy lab 4 days a week. I have anatomy lab Tues-Fri from 9am-12. This is great because we can go right into lab, no class before hand, but it sucks for the same reason because there is no reason not to skip at least part of lab when it is your first class. But oh well, c'est la vie.
I have epidemiology 5 days a week at various times. This is the study of disease in herds/populations. So like when there is an epidemic this is the field that finds out how the problem started, how it can be fixed, exactly how bad it is, and how we can keep it from happening again. The tests are open note and open book....so I hope that means it will go well and not that it will be so awful that even my notes won't help.

We still have developmental anatomy once a week. We love the professor and the tests are amazingly straight forward and pretty easy. It is also really interesting to learn how the body develops in the uterus and even more so to learn how things can go wrong. Did you know that people/animals can be born without hearts or without lungs or with them in weird places? Or that the esophagus can grow like it's supposed to and then just spontaneously become a blind pouch? You don't realize it until your baby is regurgitating everything it eats because it never gets to the stomach. PS. We can fix that. Medicine is way cool.

We are also taking endocrinology (study of hormones/a little reproduction) and immunology (the study of immunity and immune reactions). I haven't had immunology yet, but the man who teaches endocrine is fabulous and hysterical. All you need in vet school is a few good laughs to get you through the day.

No business blogging

Because I have 6 exams in the next week.
2 of which are the cumulative finals for a class that we have had since the beginning of last semester.
But you gotta take time out for yourself, and how else will you know what I'm up to?

Having Harvey here has been awesome, he has been super well behaved and I bring him nearly everywhere with me. If we have a meeting, Harvey goes. If I have to study at night at school, I bring him with. Plus we go to the park and such too. I think he really is having a vacation.

Other than that it is mostly studying. I mean I wish I could say that I have been doing super exciting things, but I really do have a lot coming up.

Last weekend we did go out for my girlfriends' birthdays and we made them Bingo cards for our class. Meaning that they each got a card to play Bingo on and the spaces have things that people in our class do all the time. Some of the spaces were quotes and some were actions
Examples?
"but you said!"
"Will this be on the test?"
"One time....(insert long story about aunt's neighbor's great nephew's dog)"
Cell phone ringing

So they were fun to make and fun to read over and weren't super expensive!

So finals week in vet school is like finals week in undergrad only harder.
There are more tests, with more on them, and less time.
But it is doable I believe. What is important is to try to spend a little time on everything and to try to remember what classes are the most important. For example, I am not doing very well in nutrition, so that makes me want to study for it like no body's business, but that would be silly because it is worth hardly any credits where as my microanatomy class is worth quite a bit and the final is cumulative...and part of it is tomorrow. So that is what I should be doing.

Shame on you all for distracting me. Tsk, tsk....