Lazy Day

Gah it's less than a week until finals begin and I feel totally unmotivated to study! I have an entire semester's worth of anatomy to know, half a semester of physiology, half a semester of pharmacology, and an entire semester's worth of material for both physical diagnosis and radiology. Those last two hopefully won't be too terrible, but I'm not quite sure how to approach studying for them. We have exam reviews tomorrow for both classes, so I'm hoping I have a better idea of what to expect and thus a good idea of where to start after class.

I've pretty much accomplished nothing this weekend. Awesome. I studied avian anatomy for a while today, and we had chicken for dinner. What does that have to do with anything? Well when you're a vet student, you find yourself more interested in the intricate structures. Yes, this does mean we poked and prodded our dinner (probably much to the disgust of our med school roomie). We were disappointed to find that none of our anatomy books had hind limb muscle guides, but you could clearly see them! We also popped open the joint space to look at the menisci and cruciate ligaments. Fun dinner! It was also extremely tasty! Yummy barbeque sauce and baked in the oven with italian pasta and peas.

Sleep?

Here's a (not so brief) run down of the last 24ish hours:

I  cleaned my room and finished off writing a letter to someone.

I went for a nice long swim! That pretty much made everything all better. I saw another new fish, found kind of a weird snail/slug type critter on a rock, added more "tan" to my back (I think I will just forever be pale in front), and saw the barracuda again! He is such a beautiful fish. He is at least 2 feet long and extremely people shy. Supposedly they are very curious, but not this guy (and rightfully so!). I wish he'd stick around for 2 seconds longer so I could watch him even more, but he sees me and he takes off. This is a very good move on his part, because although I would never hurt him, there are plenty of Grenadians and students that would happily turn him into dinner! I also found a few hermit crabs, some pretty sea shells, and mutually scared myself and a crab half to death but setting my hand on top of where he was buried in the sand! Yikes! I'm very glad he was more interested in getting away as fast as he could than punishing me for being clumsy!

(I swear it isn't dead, it's just the water/slime in my hand!)

(The sandy patches are where I swim out to the reef, where the waves are is the reef)

 

I went to the bank and the grocery store and stocked up on food for the week. IGA is officially out of cookies-majorly disappointed with that! I foresee cookie baking in my vet roomie and I's futures : D.

I spent 10 hours at the small animal clinic (usually it's 7) and got home at 3am. I walked in to doctors and techs in the middle of fixing two security dogs who had gotten into a dog fight. We had to anesthetize one and then the other to take care of their puncture wounds. That took about 4 hours to finish up. We spent the remaining few hours of our shift discussing medical stuff, classwork, and just randomly chatting. We finished off taking care of all our patients at 12:15a and were just getting ready to leave when the phone rang. Yay! I guess I'm really glad it happened before we left rather than get all the way home (and up the mountain) just to find out I needed to come back. One of the upper term students needed her cat to be seen, and by the time we finished up with them and kindly helping finish off other treatments, it was 3am! So late!

This morning I woke up at 8:30a to spend the morning and early afternoon playing with horses. Our large animal society had their horse handling labs today. We started the morning off haltering and leading the horses around, followed by picking up their feet and cleaning them. In the afternoon, we talked more about a lameness exam, learned how to hoof test, what structures to palpate in the distal limb, and how to place a leg wrap. It was a ton of fun! I don't really have much experience working with horses, so I definitely enjoy any opportunity to become more comfortable with them and put my book knowledge to use on a live animal!

 (Alamo wanted no part in being haltered but was a good sport for picking up feet!)

 (Hoof testers and limb palpation-does not hurt the horse, looking for abnormal pain)

 (leg wraps for support)

The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to a heavenly shower (that I had been waiting for since last night but didn't because it's a jinx to shower and be clean while still on call!), uploading 200 pictures, and taking a lovely 4 hour nap.

Then it was dinner time : D. Eggs for lunch and pancakes for dinner! Very tasty. After dinner my vet roomie and I watched The Finder together and I worked on some avian anatomy. I am currently waiting for my laundry to finish drying so that I can go to bed. Hope it finishes soon!!!

Pouting

That exam was hard!!! I am currently pouting over how difficult it was and my grade (I'm being petty, I'll get over it). I really should be celebrating the fact that I didn't miss more than I did because I swear I had at least half of the exam questions starred as questions I was really unsure about my answer. Hmph.

My plans for the rest of the day? Cleaning up my room because it's a bit of a disaster, some beach time, a trip to the grocery store, a nap if I can squeeze one in, and then working at the clinic from 5p-12a/8a. Tomorrow I might get to do a horse handling lab for several hours (as long as SVECCS doesn't keep me up all night with calls).

I guess I really can't complain too much, my "therapy" for post-exam time means going to the beach on a tropical island. : D

Time For Another Final

Eek, bacteriology final exam tomorrow morning! At least this one is tomorrow at 9a, now hopefully the professor will remember to show up at the correct time haha. As long as that happens and the exam isn't too unreasonable, hopefully I will do well!

A Pharmacology "Pep Talk"

Just thought I'd share a summary of the 8am pharmacology pep talk we received yesterday morning. It's all about next semester by the way. It started with the professor talking about the speech he gave the 3rd term class on day one of this semester. He said he essentially tried to scare the crap out of them on day one in hopes that they would study more and be more serious about the course. The guinea pig class from the fall fell flat on their faces the whole semester, and he was really trying to avoid that. And for awhile, it seemed to work. However, 50% of the class still failed the midterm exam. Which was still a great surprise to the pharmacology team (look at our notes, listen to our lectures, you will feel surprise at their surprise). They are looking at re-structuring the class in terms of exams, to see if they can avoid running into this mess again. Instead of two tests, a midterm, and a final, they're looking at four tests and one comprehensive final. The current system makes the midterm and final only half cumulative (up to the midterm and then after the midterm). I have a stack of 350-400 index cards on my desk right now, one for each drug we've covered this term. Now, we have in no way covered that many drugs, but we have covered a substantial number, and mentioned a whole lot more in passing. Split that stack between a midterm and final, it sounds a little more bearable. But that whole stack for one exam?? YIKES!! We were also promised said final would just cover the most important and basic information. Okay, that doesn't sound too bad right? Sure, if either they were going to notify us what was really relevant or it was easy to figure that out, but our pharmacology class is one big game of trivia. And almost 100% of the time what seems important is not on the exam, it's some other obscure detail that you may or may not have remembered to look at (if it was even in the notes).

In short, pharmacology 2 does not sound fun. It sounds terrifying. And I am amused that the professor has decided to try and instill fear into us 4 months ahead of time. Maybe that will work this time. HAHA yeah right!

I Fixed It!

I am very proud of myself, I solved my internet issues today : D. The problem from Monday kind of intensified yesterday (particularly last night) and I got really tired of the constant connect/disconnect happening! I'm not really sure why the problem resolved, but I tried all of the tricks I could think of and now it's happy again, yay!

We are pretty much down to two classes left. We finished off our final pharmacology lecture yesterday, so pretty much all that is left is anatomy and physiology for 2 more days. Crazy! It also means having class at 9am instead of 8am, which I am a huge fan of (I miss things starting slightly later haha). I don't get more sleep, I just get to stay up later and wake up later. And somehow this makes me feel better!

My bacteriology final exam is Friday morning-yikes!! My study guide is all sorts of colorful. 6 different highlighters for different categories (if I had more than 6 different colors, there would probably be more categories!) and now I'm annotating it. Lots of fun. We have a ton of bacteria to know for this exam and I'm not really looking forward to that. This is a 4 credit class, so I am really hoping to do well! Fingers crossed!

One of my Hokie friends was accepted to SGU's fall DVM class today-congrats! My vet roomie and I are very excited to have more Hokies here!

Not Much New On The Home Front

No much exciting going on down here in Grenada. 2 weeks of class left and then finals week begins! Finals have already technically started since we finished immunology a week ago, have bacteriology on Friday, and physical diagnosis next week, but eh details.

I have been fairly productive today and very productive yesterday. It feels so good to get so much studying done! In three weeks from now it will all be over and I'll be snuggled in my bed with Penny! Now to keep up the study motivation for 21 more days...oy!

The internet has decided that today seemed as good a day as any to be problematic. Yay. I just love weird connectivity problems showing up after 3 months of dormancy. I am glad I at least get to pick between wifi and ethernet, most rooms don't randomly get our FIrefly network. Unfortunately, Firefly wireless is Grenadian and therefore certain websites don't work. The biggest ones are TV network shows and pandora-must have music while I study for hours on end! Luckily I can get around this by using a special secure VPN to my home university! The ethernet has a NY IP address so it's usually not a problem (just today when it randomly decided to go on the fritz).