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!

Life lessons and heartbreak

Has it been almost 20 days since my last post already? I have just finished my externship in D.C. and a short visit to a clinic in Fairfax (possible job opportunity???). The externship was okay, not anything exceptionally exciting. I think it was the rest of my time back in my college town that was the most eye opening.

Have you ever gone back to visit your childhood home or alma mater or previous job to find that everything has changed? I don't think that's actually an accurate assessment. I think everything usually stays the same and it's you who has changed. That is most definitely what happened to me. I stayed with my best friend, Amanda, in College Park, MD (home of the great UMD Terrapins) and realized that I have changed so much in the past three years. I've matured, as scary as that is to think.

So back to my original thought. If I didn't get a lot out of my externship what did I get out of my time in Marland and D.C.? Well, a lot . . . I think.

1. Internships and years on the job don't make you a great veterinarian.

Okay, so that's a bold statement. But there was something I noticed about the vets in D.C. (most of whom had done internships): none of them were particularly great at communicating with their clients. I saw so many of them confuse the owners and lose opportunities to help out the patients because of a lack of communication skills. I knew that if they had just allowed me to talk I could have explained things and convinced the owner (without being too pushy) that Fluffy's broken tooth is painful, Sparky can lose some weight, or their are other options to declawing for Fifi. Then I saw the vets in Fairfax, most of whom did not do internships, who were great vets and had some amazing skills with their clients. It reassured me that I can do just fine without doing an internship. I just have to have faith in my great people skills and my own knowledge.

2. All but one will break your heart.

This is another bold, somewhat cryptic statement. What I mean to say is that all the men you date in your life will break your heart until you find the one that doesn't, the one you are supposed to be with. My heart was broken twice over the past three weeks. Once by a man who I thought was going to be the right one for me, but then decided he would rather stay with his girlfriend who he admits doesn't make him happy and who he is not attracted to. He told me he was too scared to break up with her right now. So really, he would rather be with someone who makes him unhappy than be with me. That's a real confidence booster.

Then there was Mitch. I have had a thing for this guy since my freshman year of college. For the past 7 years I have pined away for him, thinking I saw something in him that no one else did. I was just waiting until he finally manned up, matured a little bit and realized that I was everything he was looking for. We've been friends for years and I knew he was going to realize all this when I saw him again. He pursued me while I was in town, called me, begged me to come over to watch movies and cuddle. He showed every sign of being interested. Then, all of a sudden, he started avoiding me. When I finally talked to him he acted as if nothing happened and just shrugged his shoulders. I should preface this by saying this happened once before in college. I thought he had grown up a bit since then. He hadn't. Mitch broke my heart into a thousand little pieces and then just walked away like it was no big deal.

My friend Mary tells me I'm building karmic points with the universe. I've had so much heartbreak in my past that the universe owes me big time and it will eventually deliver an amazing person to love.

3. True friends are hard to come by but will always be there for you.

That's what Mary and Amanda showed me while I was in town. I hadn't seen Amanda in 2 years, Mary I hadn't seen in 3. I have talked to them a little bit while I've been in school but not too much. It didn't matter. It was as if no time had passed. They are both desperately trying to get me to move back to the metro area. I think I might seriously look into it. My family isn't there but at least I know I will have some good friends nearby that I could count on.

So that's it, my diatribe for the moment. Life lessons learned while on the road. I will be getting back to school this weekend after stopping at my parent's to pick up my cats (one of whom is now "fat as a house" now according to my mother . . . great). Back to school, back to the grind, and time to get ready for boards, a job search, and graduation. Scary.