Wait, I missed that, can you go over it again?

I think I missed the part when clinics ended. It was so sudden. No one went running down the hallways, no formal announcement was made, no one even tried to burn their coat. It just ended. One second we were on and then we weren't.

My last two weeks on clinics were nothing much to speak of. I was on my pathology rotation and didn't like it very much. Well, I should clarify. I liked the clin path portion in the mornings, but the anatomic path in the afternoons was horrible. I hated cutting up people's pets. Removing limbs, ripping off heads, cutting out eyes. Ugh. It was terrible. I know pathology is important but I personally don't believe in destroying bodies like that. Even though the pathologists try to be respectful I feel that the act of a necropsy is fundamentally disrespectful. We only had one cosmetic necropsy and it was on a Cockatoo. The bird died because it was seizuring every 5 minutes so a cosmetic necropsy wasn't likely to help. Everyone was making fun of the owners and saying how stupid they were and I seemed to be the only one that actually sympathized with them. The bird was 35 and probably had the same owners for its entire life. I can understand why they wouldn't want her head ripped off and the brain taken out. Luckily it only took a small incision on the head to find out what happened. The bird hit its head when it was flailing around and had a pretty large compression fracture in the skull. I did the suturing to sew the bird back up. I made sure she was nice and clean and dry so that the owners would be able to hold him before they buried her. I felt like I did a mitzvah. Like I said though, I know its important, I just hope I never have to do it again.

The worst part was that with the exception of a few cases we never found what killed the animals grossly. The worst was doing the horses and the aborted fetuses. They were so smelly and nasty. I got the fun job of running the gut on a horse and when I went to open the cecum I wasn't thinking and cecum gas burst into my face. It was horrible. Then, when I was doing an aborted foal the resident threw the body into a barrel and blood and guts splashed all over my face. It even hit my glasses, which I thankfully had on because otherwise it would have been my eye. I was none too pleased.

I can't believe clinics is already over. It seems like only a few weeks ago we were starting and had no idea what we were doing. I've since seen our class grow and change. We've all become a bit more confident. Some of us have stepped out of our shells. I've seen several people befriend new people in different groups. There are people who I never talked to before clinics that have now become friends. If I hadn't been forced to work with some people I may have gone 4 years without realizing what an awesome person they are. Then there is the opposite end of the spectrum. I still can't stand Damien and working with him in any way was miserable. And Allie, who will always have more drama than I can stand in her life. Who can forget the off-shore students? Paul came into the school and practically took over. Goodwin was awesome too, everyone is so sad that he's graduating and leaving us. And, of course, Glen who I still hate.

Its been an interesting 8 months. I learned so much about veterinary medicine. I actually feel like if I was put on the spot, I might be able to treat a patient on my own. I also learned a lot about myself. I started off with the mindset that I was going to go into equine medicine. Now I'm a small animal surgery girl. I also learned that I need to lay low to keep out of drama. Having drama in your life is not a good thing. It only leads to annoyance and anger. And no matter how tired I get, I am actually capable of still waking up at 5:30 in the morning to go to work.

Its been a long road with a lot of ups and downs but its over now and we can all relax. Now I can focus on our big class New Year's party. Classes start Jan. 2. Not much time to enjoy being free but I'll take what I can get.

This rotation makes me itch . . .

So I've started dermatology. Its alright. The first day we were done at 10am. No joke. We only receive on Tues., Thurs., and Fri. Its nice to not be so busy actually, especially since I'm sort of ready for clinics to be over. To be honest, I haven't even seen many interesting cases. Most of what we see are re-checks and all the ones I saw were doing pretty good. The clinicians are okay. The residents are pretty cool. She's one of the 1st year residents and she has a pretty good sense of humor which I appreciate. Dr. Highstress drives me up the wall though. She is so high stress that it makes me freak out. Everything makes her nervous which in turn makes me nervous. She freaks out over the dumbest things, like me picking up a bag of dog food or having to hold a cat. Plus she talks down to all of us which is infinitely annoying. Poor Mary, on the first day we had receiving Dr. Highstress started baby talking to her and telling her how unprepared she was. I thought she sounded harsh at the time so I said something to Mary later. Turns out Mary wasn't prepared because she just broke up with her boyfriend of 4 and 1/2 years the night before. Poor thing. Relationship troubles are never easy and getting reprimanded doesn't make it any easier.

Mary and I actually had an overnight wards shift together last night. It went by pretty quickly actually. She and I talked most of the night about everything from school to boys to the people we liked and didn't like. It was a nice little gossip-fest. One of the dogs, Maggie, was really sweet and we let her out for most of the night. She slept on one of the mats we laid out and I actually fell asleep for a bit next to her. The only thing about this wards shift was that the tech who rounded with us failed to mention to us that there was a cat in the recovery section. The lights were turned off and there's not usually supposed to be anything in there at night so Mary and I never went in. When the student came in the next morning to take care of the cat we realized that we didn't do anything for the poor thing all night. I was so pissed that he didn't tell us about the cat. I hate looking like a slacker. One of the ICU techs called the clinician for us to make sure we didn't get in trouble. Turns out the same tech forgot about the cat the day before too.

Because the fates are against us we are on primary call this weekend. The derm residents are usually not on call and when they are they hate it. I mean, thats why they go into derm, to not have to do emergencies. I like seeing emergencies so I kind of hope I get called in. Call me a glutton for punishment.

Good-bye barns!

Its over! I made it through large animal surgery! Alright, I'll be honest, it wasn't that bad. This past week was actually okay. We had a couple of interesting surgeries and we worked well together as a team. This rotation was not nearly as bad as my large animal medicine rotation. I had a laryngeal tie-back surgery which was pretty interesting. However, I did spend most of my time as a retractor and my arms were killing me by the end of it. But on the plus side I did get to stand on a stool and be the tallest person in the room for once, and I got to work with Dr. Freds who is so nice and has a great sense of humor. Then today we had to make sure that the tie-back was still in place so we scoped the horse. Dr. Gray actually let me drive the scope! It was so cool! Earlier in the week we had a horse go to surgery to have a tooth taken out. I got the lucky job of sticking my arm in the horse's mouth to show the surgeons where to repel. Then I had to catch the tooth. My hands smelled like horse breath for the rest of the day!

The three of us really bonded over this rotation. I feel like I have two new friends that I wish I had known about over the past two years. We have similar senses of humor, similar outlooks on life and none of us took ourselves too seriously. One of the girls and I sat up in one of the viewing rooms to watch a colic surgery one day and ended up talking for two hours just about life and school and everything else. Turns out she's super cool and I'm sad I didn't get to know her sooner. But after being in clinics and the changes in dynamics between my friends I'm definitely glad to have some new people to call friends.

We did have a little bit of excitement on the last day. A horse came in who was sired by Storm Cat (yes, THE Storm Cat). This horse was worth $500,000 before he was even born. He was colicking so badly he looked like he was just going to lay down and die. Another classmate tried to tell me he didn't look so painful because he wasn't rolling or biting at his sides. I tried to explain to her that he was WAY past that point. I can't adequately describe how he looked, it was so bad. They finally took him to surgery at 8 at night and instead of finding some crazy intussusseption it turns out he had proximal enteritis. Well, now he's got significant ventral edema since he can't hold fluid in his vessels and he has his feet constantly iced. The sad thing is that he was already slotted to run in the Kentucky Derby this year. Unfortunately its not looking like thats going to happen for him. I don't know how the case turned out but it was very sad.

I go onto dermatology next. Then after that pathology. Thank goodness, I'm starting to wind down, my brain is done with this whole clinics thing.