What a Day!

Nothing out of the ordinary happened, but I feel like I did nothing but run in circles all day.

In anatomy lab we are dissecting the head now. If you don't want to know what that means or how that's done, skip this paragraph. We started lab yesterday by switching animals around for a fourth and final time. Since my group has never had a cat, we traded for a cat. I kind of planned it this way because when working with the head, I felt it would be less traumatic and disgusting to work with a tiny head and since I never learn anything in lab anyway, it doesn't really matter if we can't see 50% of the things we're supposed to find because they're too small on our cat. Any how, we cut the head off the cat, dissected out the tongue attached to the esophagus and trachea (called the pluck), and then sawed the head in half. Literally. With a saw. Of all the things we've done in lab this semester, sawing a head in half and breaking all the ribs was by far the worst and most gruesome part. Most of the head sawing was done by the lab guy, who is impressively good at this bit. For our head, he held it in his hand like an apple and simply sliced it into two halves. I personally would never touch a sharp object that large much less use it so close to my hand!! Dissection is pretty boring work right now since basically only one person works at a time. I really need to start reviewing vessels, nerves, and some random muscles (and oh yeah, the entire reproduction system that I skipped because I didn't go to lab or pay attention when I was there-hey it wasn't on our exam last week!).

I am extremely impressed with the veterinarian who teaches the small animal portion of our clinical nutrition class so far. He seems brilliant. His intelligence is a bit intimidating, but I find myself hanging on to every word he says. I am definitely going to learn a ton about nutrition and I am very excited to finally have some knowledge about small animal nutrition.

Any how, night after night I fail to meet my goal of going to bed "early," as it is already 1:30am. Never enough sleep here!