Being a real doctor! (Sort of)

Last night I got to participate in my first healthy pet clinic, and can't WAIT to do the next one! This program is run by the vet school once a month, and it serves dual purposes: to vaccinate, examine and give limited treatments to the pets of low-income families in our area, and to give vet students a taste of being the primary clinician with real patients and their owners. We're somewhat supervised, of course, but by and large it's the students doing physical exams, giving out advice, and dispensing medications. Most of the animals are only there for vaccines and a basic checkup, and the owners understand that sometimes all we can do is say "Head to your regular vet for some diagnostic tests" if something appears to be really wrong, but it's great to be out there doing something to help the local community, and getting to be an actual junior professional for a little while! This is a HOT program among the students for obvious reasons, and it took some luck and waking up seriously early to get in on this one... plus, for the first time all year the date didn't conflict with some major, important test.

My partner and I saw six cats and a puppy in the course of three hours- I successfully drew blood from *two* cats WITHOUT causing hematomas (first time ever, so proud of myself :), and hopefully we prevented seven possible rabies cases, six FeLV infections, one distemper/parvo infection, and killed a whole lot of fleas and other parasites (the drug companies donate quite a few flea, tick, heartworm and other parasite preventatives to dispense to owners free of charge). All told, it was a great place to work on PE's and client communication... both of which I'd like to be better at sometime before clinics. Can't wait til the next one... hopefully it won't be the day before my neuro final. That is the one unfortunate tradeoff we face as students- higher grades or more experience? There is SO much going on at any given time that it would be very easy to neglect studying and attend seminars, wetlabs and demos seven days a week, so we've all had to settle into our own patterns and choose how much time to spend between books and the real world. Similar to college, I kind of want to spend a year here without classes, just attending all those bonus seminars and lectures and getting my hands dirty in wetlabs and clinics... but in the meantime, balance is key, and whatever I'm doing hasn't failed me out yet so I'll just try to keep it up!

Miscellany

That basically describes the distribution period, and what I've been doing... none of which are really blog-worthy on their own (in the form of some kind of cohesive story) but I can stick them all together to give you some idea of my "spring". (I'm aware that it is technically the "spring" semester but it's still 5 degrees at night... and during the day... so I refuse to call it that until, oh, May.)

Comparative anatomy
Taking up most of my class time is dissection, once again. This time it's not dogs, it's... whatever the professor can wheel and deal for on this strange anatomy professor network of animal parts suppliers, from biological companies to zoos to whoever happened to have an interesting species die this week/month/year/etc. (Seriously. They have a listserv and bargain with each other for whose school gets the interesting carcasses.) We've primarily been working on two goats, a sheep, and three rabbits (that is not a dissection rabbit, that is MY rabbit, see below), but we had a brief visit from some elephant wrists last week and today was a batch of recently killed woodchucks- revenge for the rodents giving us six more weeks of winter yesterday. Not that we'd have any less than that here. Still. The point of the class is to note similarities across species and basically get a feel for the anatomy of non-dog animals we may, or may not, encounter in practice someday. Later we'll have some reptiles, maybe some birds, we'll see... allegedly our professor is trying to arrange for us to dissect half a dolphin soon... should be interesting :)

Large Animal Neonates
I'm not a large animal person by any stretch but this is a cool distribution because a large part of it involves volunteering as a foal sitter in the LA Neonatal ICU. "Foal season" recently started and the sickest ones are starting to trickle into the hospital... my first shift is later in the month so we'll see how that goes!

Neuroanatomy
Is death. 'Nuff said. Hey at least it's not brain surgery! Wait...

Other than class....

CPS
OK, technically I am getting credit for this, but it's quasi-extracurricular. It involves working in the Community Practice Service taking patient histories and performing the first of several physical exams on patients by progressively more experienced students. Of course, it's winter, and the caseload is somewhat low, so when there aren't any clients they ship us off to whatever hospital service will take a shadow for a few hours. Which is kind of cool... it works out to be like mini-clinics. One day they tagged me onto an exotics case (ferret with insulinoma... see why I didn't get a ferret?) which got sent to ICU, so I wound up in ICU for the afternoon. Another day I hung out in internal medicine with some third years. It's a good taste of what's to come in two years, which I prefer not to think about quite yet...

VSPCA
Yes technically I got credit for this too through CPS but I do it anyway because it's fun :) We do shelter intake physical exams at the local SPCA once a month, and it's a great way to practice your PE without clients shooting nervous glances at you. My pig-bleeding skills appear to be better than my cat-bleeding skills, however, so I need all the practice I can get...

SVECCS
Basically all the vet school clubs are known by acronyms, in case you didn't notice... I *think* this one stands for Society of Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Specialists... or maybe it's Students... you get the idea either way. I got to shadow another day in the ICU through this group which was pretty cool. Again, low caseload, but I got to sit in on rounds with the upperclassmen and hopefully absorbed some really useful information about acute liver failure in cats, and fluid therapy. Or it possibly escaped my mind shortly after listening since I only understood about 1/3 of what they were talking about... oh well, I tried. It'll be put back in another 2 years.

Basil
Is my bunny, for those who don't know, and provides entertainment in lieu of television. Last week he happy-danced himself right off my bed. Last night he tried to jump through a mirror to greet the bunny on the other side (it failed). Today he brought large pieces of the straw mat he's been destroying to the door of his cage to show me all the progress he's made. It's nice to be reminded of why I'm here sometimes :)