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!