I passed!!!

Let us all now gather and dance a dance of joy!

Haha, seriously though, I passed the NAVLE. I found out a couple of weeks ago while on my internal medicine rotation. What a relief! Now all I have to do is get through the next few months of clinics and I'll be a real doctor once and for all!

The last few months have been very hectic for me both in my personal and professional life, hence the non-posting. I did get to spend quite a bit of time with my family over the holiday break, which was nice. Well, except for the giant fight we all got in before we even were in the same house together. But thats how my family rolls, we fight and yell but in that really loving sort of way. I also got to see my grandparents which was especially nice. My grandfather is not doing so great and we all are wondering how long it will be until something happens. I will say though, for a man who has two hip replacements, a pacemaker, lumbosacral disease, and blue legs (yes, you heard me, they're actually blue), he's doing pretty well.

My first rotation back on clinics was Orthopedic Surgery with a clinician who is notorious for keeping an insane schedule. On our busiest day (which was not much busier than a regular day) we saw 19 appointments between 9:30am and 12:30pm, 13 of which were new patient evaluations. That day I saw 5 evaluations, 4 of which ended up staying for surgery over the next two days. Yeah, I had 4 inpatients at once. Insane. Over those two weeks I had 8 surgeries that were mine, plus I scrubbed into several more that they needed help on. That's unheard of on this rotation. It was so much fun though. I love being busy and moving fast and I perform best when things are crazy. Plus I had an awesome team, Jimmy and Laura were so much fun and really on top of their game. Oh yeah, there were only 3 of us, no joke. I got to drill some stuff and I was even allowed to do the lateral imbrication on a medial patellar luxation repair. That was pretty neat since most of the time on Ortho you're not allowed to do anything. It was pretty sweet.

I moved onto vacation next. I took this time to travel up to the D.C. region to interview at some hospitals. It went well but I still don't know where I'm going and truthfully the whole story is a topic for another post. I'll just leave it at that for now.

As soon as I got back from interviewing I went straight to NAVC. As usual it was awesome. I stayed with a couple of girls from my class at a hotel provided by our SCAVMA. Apparently I've picked up some new sleep habits. I was sharing a bed with Gretchen and at one point I sat straight up in bed, yelled "I'll lick your face!", and then went back to sleep. I also got up and turned all the lights on at some point in the evening. The next night I got up and tried to get into bed with the other two girls in the room. I woke up as I was doing this and was totally freaked out. My nighttime antics have now become a running joke.

The conference itself was good though. I got to go to some good talks, saw my friend Stic, and had a great time at the evening activities. One of our soft tissue surgeons made me slap him in the face at our alumni reception. He made fun of me then told me he was bad and grabbed my hand to slap him in the face. It was weird. But hilarious.

Murray and Lexy stayed with my parents through most of January. And of course my mother left tons of stuff out for Murray to eat. He destroyed a sweater, sweatshirt, towel, blanket, gloves, and other items. The towel blocked him up for a while and my mom was so worried she would hover over the litter box waiting for him to poop. I knew he was going to be fine because he wasn't vomiting but my mother was sure it was going to be surgery #4.

The last two weeks have been spent on internal medicine. Which has been awesome. We were pretty busy and I took as many emergencies as I could get. I had a lot of interesting cases and my clinicians were amazing. I totally rocked out hardcore while on medicine and it didn't go unnoticed. Our clinician pulled me aside at the end of the rotation to tell me what a great job I did and how he expects to hear great things about me in the future. This particular clinician is the one who introduced me to Ettinger and one of the "godfathers" of internal medicine. He was part of the crew at AMC back in the '70's who went on to write all the books we know and love today. So to hear from him that he thought I was ready for practice really meant a lot.

Now I move on to dermatology. So I will have much more time to relax, post entries, and work on job stuff. I need to post some of the cases from my medicine rotation since they were so interesting. I know I'm a posting slacker, I hope you all will forgive me!

2 months since my last post . . . I know, I fail.

So I've been reminded that I haven't posted in a while . . . my bad. There's no real good reason for this but I will say I've been pretty distracted the past couple of months with the following life developments:

1. Job hunt

After making the final decision to look for a job rather than an internship I then had to decide where and how to look for one. Long story short: I decided to focus my search in the Atlanta and D.C. areas. I basically sent my resume and cover letter out to over 20 practices and hoped for the best. I have one or two really solid opportunities in the D.C. region and several practices that don't have a job at the moment but really want to meet with me. I'll be flying up to D.C. in January to look at a bunch of practices and will hopefully walk away with an offer or two.

Atlanta hasn't really panned out but I'm not too upset over that. As much as my mother wants me to be close to home we really do better when we're in different states. She actually wants me to live at home until I have enough to buy my own place or get married. With the amount of crazy we have between the two of us I'm thinking that wouldn't end so well.

Currently the job thing is on hold until my semester is really over but there should be some really interesting developments in that very soon.

2. The NAVLE

Yeah, definitely taking the national board exam in 2 weeks. Kind of freaking out a little bit. Some of my classmates have already taken it and they seem to be enjoying telling the rest of us that the exam was totally random and they feel like they failed. Awesome.

3. Murray

So those of you that read this blog relatively regularly (or as regularly as I post) know that my little kitty Murray has a slight eating disorder. I couldn't take waking up and finding everything in my house eaten anymore. Plus, I can't afford for that stupid cat to have anymore surgery. So, he's been started on Prozac. Yes, my cat is on Prozac. Its been working really well up until a few days ago when he started in with eating socks again. I'm going to be adding in Feliway to see if that helps. He's become a little bit different of a cat but definitely much easier to deal with.

The funny thing is, as soon as Murray started to become a bit sedate with the Prozac, Lexy started becoming way more playful. I guess since Murray didn't have to be the center of attention anymore she could come into her own a bit. Its bizarre how cats have such individual personalities.

4. School

This has actually not been that exciting until the last week or so. We finally started our advanced small animal surgery course. So far we've had a couple of orthopedics labs where we got to play with IM pins, cerclage wires and external fixators on fake bones. Playing with drills is awesome. I did manage to slash my thumb open during the first lab but I survived. We also just had a cadaver lab for the soft tissue portion where we had to repair a wound. My group had a large wound over the caudal lumbar spine so we amputated the tail and used the skin from that to cover the defect. It was a super cool surgery and our professor said no student group had ever thought to do that before. Tomorrow we get to practice doing FHOs (femoral head osteotomies) and cancellous bone graft collection.


So that's it in a nutshell really. I'll try to update more frequently, I promise! The next few months are going to be a bit of a whirlwind. In January I'm back in the clinic again and things should should start to get more interesting. Oh, and not like I'm keeping track or anything but as of yesterday there are only 6 months until graduation. Wooooo!

My next adventure

Senior banquet, graduation, the end of classes . . . its all come and gone. I still can't believe I am officially a senior in vet school. Just the thought of it seems ridiculous. In one year I will be graduating. Weird.

Since the end of classes I've been alternating between being incredibly lazy and incredibly productive. I finally got all of the information from Open House together to pass on down to next year's committee. I also met with the clinician and resident I'm doing research with to talk about where we're going (I'm doing a super cool retrospective study on our use of the VAC bandage). I've also made great strides on my cross-stitching project. (I've been working on the damn thing for about a year and a half.) Alright, maybe the last one doesn't quite fit into the productive category but I like it. The flip side of my vacation has been that I've been sleeping a ridiculous amount (almost as much as my cats). I think I've just been catching up from my lack of sleep this semester.

All of that doesn't matter that much to me though. Tomorrow the real fun starts.

I'm doing 4 externships this summer and I leave tomorrow. I'll first be driving to the Atlanta area to visit my parents and give them the kitty cats for the summer. Then I drive to Dallas for two weeks. After that I fly out to LA for another two weeks and then fly back to Dallas so I can drive back home (which is about 850 miles). I'll be home for two weeks before driving up to New Jersey for two weeks then driving to D.C. (the best city on the planet) for two (possibly three) weeks.

So the past few days I've been cleaning my house and putting off packing. Which means the bulk of today is dedicated to packing like a mad woman. How do you pack when you're going to be gone for over a month? I guess I'll find out. Plus I have to pack up the car with all the cat's stuff which includes their cage (which thankfully folds up), two air filters (my dad is allergic), all their toys, some litter boxes, their food, etc. It's like traveling with children. I don't know what I'm going to do with them during the ride (it's about 6 hours). I'll have to stop to give them water I guess and maybe see if they'll go to the bathroom on their harnesses (though I doubt it). If you have any advice on traveling long distances with cats I would really like to hear it.

To add some more excitement to today I have a friend driving up tonight to hang out for a bit. We went to college together and just realized that we live in the same state. I should probably have my head examined for all of this.

I'll be sure to keep posting while I'm on the road and on my externships. This is going to be an awesome summer.