Friday, March 05, 2004

 

The Entity

First year, second semester is the "large animal" semester. We get to dissect dead cows and horses, and we get to restrain, poke, palpate, milk, and downright annoy the live ones. Just yesterday I squeezed milk out of a real live cow teat for maybe the second time in my life. I also learned how to induce urination, draw blood, test for udder infection, and manipuate a pill the size of golf ball down a cow's throat. And I almost got shat upon about three times. It wasn't exactly a date with Matt Damon, but it was kind of fun.

The wonderful smell of large animal (a mixture of hay, manure and other bodily secretions) has infiltrated my skin, my hair, my clothes, and even my apartment. After I take a shower, the hay-manure smell lingers in the bathroom steam. It's everywhere, and like the smell of formaldahyde, it soon becomes unnoticeable to the person carrying it.

And of course, when I'm not smelling like poo and hay, I'm smelling like poo and formadalyde (we've been dissecting the bowels, which are full of. . .you guessed it, poo), much to the dismay of the person standing in line behind me at the grocery store. I feel like Pigpen, like this big greenish brown cloud of putridity (or as one of our texbooks put it, "an evil smell") is blowing around me everywhere I go. I can see the waves of stink rise from my skin when I'm taking a shower, and from my clothes when I take them to the laundromat.

It's all in a day's learning. And at the end of the day, I do my best with the soap and shampoo to get rid of it, but I think it's become a part of me. So if you're ever at County Market and there's some tired, foul-smelling person in the vicinity contaminating your air--give them some slack; they're probably a first-year vet student.

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