Monday, September 15, 2003
Finding time to Blah blah blog
Finding time to blog is more difficult than I though it would be. When I'm not in class or at a club meeting or in the lab or at the Wildlife Clinic I feel like I should be studying. If I didn’t make an effort to remember, I'd forget to eat.
Anyway, the whole point of keeping this weblog is to give my perspective on being a veterinary student for the edification of those who are considering veterinary school or for those who are just curious what vet school is like. I'll try to recap anything interesting that happens throughout my experiences, but even that is a daunting task. I could write a book about this week alone.
So what happened since last Tuesday? One of my lab partners left the program (I think that makes three in the class so far), I saw some more squirrels come into the wildlife clinic (one just died yesterday), palpated a dead deer's radial fracture, learned how to give a red-eared slider (turtle) a warm nolvasan bath (he's got an open shell wound with a fungus infection), realized the sad truth about Puddles' life before he passed, took the first anatomy exam, and watched my classmates snarf down deep-fried hog testicles. There's stuff I'm leaving out, only because it's escaped my mind for now.
"Pyxis," the red-eared slider, getting a Nolvasan bath
Note the wire on his shell keeping the cracked parts together--like stitches!
So tomorrow we have the first exam for renal (kidney) physiology, which is mostly formulas and math problems. These word problems bring me back to high school algebra:
"A dehydrated, anorexic* cat is presented to you for work-up. You decide to give fluid intravenously and choose 0.45% (wt/vol) saline (58g/mol) with glucose based on your examination and blood chemistry. If the infused solution is to have and osmolarity of 300 mOsm/L, what is the concentration of glucose (180g/mole) in the infused solution?"
*By the way, cat's don't
choose to be anorexic. It's usually a sign of another problem.
Sounds like fun, huh? So that's tomorrow's exam. It's just a bunch of step-by-step math, lots of equations and "laws," understanding of the way things flow in and out of the kidney, and all the pressures and forces that affect that flow. My only anxiety is that I will make a bunch of little mistakes on the math-based problems that will throw my calculatons off.
As for the Anatomy practical we took Friday, if you asked anyone Friday afternoon, most of the class thought they failed it. However, we did okay as a class--a mean score of 40 out of 50, wtih most people falling in the range of 35-45 out of 50. Not too shabby for a first exam. I think most people freaked out because they've been used to getting straight A's all their lives. Then getting 5 wrong out of 50 is the end of the world--but it's still an "A." Anyway, a "B" never got anyone kicked out of school.
I do plan on posting all my pictures soon--apparently there's a snafu in the school computer system, so the account I supposed to have for web space is not activated yet. But the photos ARE coming soon!
Another one down?
Apparently, there were two students who showed up the first day of classes, then eventually. . .just stopped coming. Then this week, one of our lab teammates came into lab, took her things, and left. The other three of us wished her luck after she informed us she wasn't coming back.
Let's call her Darlene. She's extremely smart and organized, and she seemed to learn anatomy very quickly. A few things I noticed about her is that she often skipped morning classes, but I figured that was because she was trying to also hold down a job. In anatomy lab, she would sometimes throw down her scalpel and just leave to go out in the hallway. No big deal, I thought, she's just had enough of the smell and needs some fresh air. Otherwise, she didn't seem stressed, and she knew her stuff. The two of us met last Saturday (the 6th) and spent about three hours in the anatomy lab reviewing for the upcoming exam. Again, in the middle of working on "Puddles," she decides she needs a break and leaves, but she didn't come back for over 30 minutes. When she finally came back, she apologized and explained she had a telephone call.
I invited to take her out for a treat at the chocolate café afterwards, and she accepted, and we talked a little about how we got to vet school and what we planned on doing after graduation. Normal conversation overall, but in hindsight I notice that she expressed interest in different things besides veterinary medicine, she expressed some distress with living on her own and having to manage a budget for the first time (she had lived in boarding school or in her dorms up until now) and she felt a little overwhelmed being in a lab group with older people who had done things other than vet med. She commented that she felt she wasn't studying enough, but I took all this as normal for a 22 year-old making a huge life transition. But now that I think of it, living on your own for the first time and committing the next four years to a career you aren't sure you want is a pretty daunting situation.
She wasn't in class Monday, but another person in our lab group saw her in the building checking her e-mail. She wasn't in class Tuesday, but again, someone saw her walking in the hallway . She wasn't in class Wednesday, but at lunch time I saw her sitting in the student affairs office. I asked her what was going on--she shrugged. I asked if I would see her tomorrow--she shrugged. As I started to feel too nosy, I stopped asking questions and told her that I hoped things worked out for her. She responded with another shrug. Then I added, "I hope things work out the way they are
supposed to work out. Darlene looked and me and said, "I really appreciate that last part. Thank you."
So there it was. At that point I knew her heart wasn't in it, and that's why she needed to leave. On Thursday she came to the lab and took her things quietly as the three of us wished her luck.
And that's that. Darlene's an intelligent girl, and I'm convinced she would have been a good student and veterinarian. But you shouldn't go into veterinary medicine just because you can, or because you're good at it. You heart has to be in it.
