Diary of a Dick Vet

Critical Analyis of Homeopathy Paper: done

HACCP project: done

I have a Parasitology quiz a week from today (!!!), an epidemiology quiz at the end of March, and a Critical Analysis for EMS also due at the end of March. Then it’s 2 weeks lambing, 2 weeks equine, and I’m back to start exams. I hope you might understand my occaisional spurts of panic. It comes and goes in waves. We’re all going through it.

The weather has turned lately. Whereas there was a polite layer of snow two weeks ago, now the sun is out and temperatures have been upper 40s (F). I always seem to be trapped indoors, but from the window I can see it’s beautiful outside.

The meadows - on the walk home

Excellent news! I’m doing two weeks equine EMS in Ireland, outside Dublin, in April. That will give me something to look forward to as I prepare papers, study for quizzes, and work my butt off lambing.

This was supposed to be a vet school blog, but ah, what the heck. Let’s add a little music.

My first first violin was a 3/4 instrument that I traded very shortly after starting, so my first true violin was a German factory-made student instrument, that I nicknamed Chester. It was new when I acquired it. One of the amazing things about violins is how gracefully they can age, which is why older violin are so sought after. The aged wood and varnish adds to the complexity of the sound of the instrument, and new instruments require a full years before the sound starts to mature and ‘open up,’ exposing its true quality.

Probably my student violin opened up over the 8 years I played it, but to my beginner’s ear I didn’t notice any changes in its quality, so much as changes in my own playing. It’s been 4 years since I played old Chester and I don’t quite remember what he sounds like.

Recently, I bought a much older violin to play while I’m in Edinburgh. I found it on ebay and bought it, which is a big no-no for instruments. I looked at the pictures, decided it was within my price limit, and took a risk. When it arrived, I wasn’t completely pleased. But I had made my own bed, so I decided to keep this new instrument, which was without label or history.

Probably it sat in someone’s closet or garage for twenty or thirty years before making it in to pawn or charity shop somewhere, and then to the auctioneer at ebay. It needs some work, but as I’ve been playing it over the past few months I’ve noticed a change in sound as it opens up. It no longer sounds meek: instead it shouts loud, resonating notes in its middle range. I really wish I could try adjusting the soundpost, which is probably not a worthwhile endeavour for such an inexpensive violin. The E string is damp, which could be fixed. And someday I will replace my ebay violin with something really finely made. But in the meanwhile, it’s been very rewarding to hear an old violin come into its own again.

I’ve been very busy of late. Unlike last semester, so far we’ve been bombarded with projects: two group assignments due within a week of each other and a few quizzes to study for, making the semester completely unlike the last. I suppose, in comparison to my last degree, my out-of-class workload is small, but added to the masses of lectures to sort through, I feel a bit like I’m drowning. I keep reminding myself that this is vet school and never once did I imagine it would be easy. However, that doesn’t stop me from feeling completely and utterly overwhelmed. This is becoming a common theme Let’s move on!

To counter the effects of a busy semester, I’m trying to add the occasional non-vetty thing to my life. I joined the gym this morning, which I’m very excited about. I used to run and it felt great, but the last few times I tried to jog in Edinburgh my lungs were in agony from the cold. I used the weather as an excuse to sit on my bum and study for most of the winter, but I need to start moving again. The other day someone told me that ‘energy begets energy’ and I can’t stop thinking about how true that is. When I was running, I actually looked forward to the next 25-minute jog. Now, I dread the 15 minute walk to class. I need to get the heart pumping again.

I’ve also been enjoying playing the violin again. The Dick Vet has brought back its orchestra, an old tradition that went missing for many years. It’s filled with about as many professors as students and most of us are quite amateur, but I love it. I forgot how nice a good rehearsal feels.

Dick Vet Musicians - with a varying number of members

With the exception of tonight - because I get home late from orchestra rehearsal - I’ve also been indulging in a good amount of sleep. I feel sharper during the day. I don’t get as many headaches as I did last semester. Who knew?

The snow has been lovely:

The meadows.

Arthur's Seat in the distance

This week is full of virology and large animal anatomy, but Wednesday has a horse and sheep handling revision section booked, so that will be fun!

One of the more fun aspects of vet school is building up a library for when you enter the real world and practise. It’s a costly enterprise, but terribly entertaining.

For current vet students and those preparing to start, I thought I would start reviewing the textbooks I use to study. If you use any of these books yourself, by all means chime in with your thoughts!

Guide to the Dissection of the Dog
Howard Evans & Alexander Delahunta

My University issues a list of book ‘recommendations’ to incoming students as part of their Welcome Packet. Completely unaware of the other options available, most vet students buy off the list and show up to class with the same set of textbooks as everyone else. However, inevitably, as the year progresses other texts start to pop up as people learn from previous years and professors of other recommendations that may better suit them.

Evans & deLahunta’s Guide to the Dissection of the Dog is a very popular source for many vet students, but in my experience it falls short of being the ‘perfect’ study tool. The illustrations are thorough, the text is generally very descriptive, and the size is nice for walking around dissection lab - mine is so covered in odd-coloured stains that it has certainly been around the lab - but for revision purposes, it hardly compares to the full-colour photographic atlases. The most popular with my class for dog are Done’s Color Atlas Of Veterinary Anatomy: Volume 3, The Dog And Cat or Boyd’s Colour Atlas of Clinical Anatomy of the Dog and Cat, both of which rely heavily on pictures of dissected specimens, and in the case of the latter, radiographs.

Anatomy is older than photographs, and centuries of doctors and veterinarians seem to have survived on sketches to study the animal body, but photographs are better. They allow you to apprecate the depth and organisation of the anatomy. That’s not to say Evans & deLahunta’s text is not useful, but it needs to be supplemented.

One other argument in its favour: it’s (comparatively) dead cheap. At £38 it’s a better deal than the other aforementioned options, which run for £70 and £51 respectively at Amazon. But as my friends and I like to say, for a course that’s £20,000 a year in tuition, what’s £100 in books that will help you pass?

In my program, the first year of University is pre-clinical (it’s the first two for the normal 5-year program) and it also holds the reputation of being the most difficult period. I really doubt that what we’re doing now will be any more difficult than what we do the next three years - although our schedule will be less tedious - but this year is terribly, terribly dry. Although each subject addressed has a case-based tutorial at the end of the lectures, most presentations tend to steer very far away from the ‘real world’ and purposefully leave out the clinical stuff.

There is a wonderful James Herriot anectdote on this very subject. In this particular chapter of All Creatures Great And Small, Herriot recounts one of his first lectures while studying vet at Glasgow. According to him, his lecturer, who was giving a presentation on the points of a horse, was very clever in throwing in little clinical examples, such as explaining related injuries as he named the points of the pelvic limb, which helped Herriot remember the lecture.

(In the rest of the anecdote, Herriot, feeling very cocky about his new knowledge of the equine anatomy after a single day of lecture, attempts to approach a horse on the street and ends up in the air at its whim, with onlookers having a good laugh. That part of the story isn’t really relevant here!)

I definitely agree with Herriot on the usefulness of clinical references. Some lecturers can really bog their students down in over-information, but recently in our neuroscience lectures there has been a perfect blend of information and real life. Neuro is a terribly difficult topic, and it’s mentally draining to be presented with part of the neuroanatomy and its function, and then rack our brains a few days latter to remember what we haven’t even had a chance to study. But, I also feel like personally I’m picking up on neuro much faster than I would have expected due to these examples. Over the past few weeks we’ve had countless videos showing dogs, horses, and even sheep with various neurological disorders. Even if I don’t always get my thoughts straight and incorrectly diagnose the problem, I feel like I really benefit from actually seeing what happens when part of the system fails.

Surprisingly, sometimes these neurological issues are just plain funny. Here’s a clip we watched in class:

Lovely day, today. There was class and all - two hours with one of my favourite professors, who is a natural storyteller and therefore always entertaining followed by a bacteriology lab and two hours of bacto lecture. But more importantly there was plenty of snow. Or, erm, enough to hold many snowball fights (although Pookish sent one flying straight into my eye, but I was okay) and to make a snowman in the middle of the park. Our snow angels were rubbish, but two-out-of-three ain’t bad!

Dinner was at a really exceptional cafe called Susie’s Wholefoods Diner. The food reminded me of the cafes I used to frequent at Davis, and the food was soooo filling and soooo tastey, I loved it. I will definitley be back. Afterwards, I went to the Festival Theatre to watch Blood Brothers, a musical about twins separated at birth and raised in two different households, who found each other with tragic consequences. I found the entire ‘twins with shared destinies’ plotline a bit silly, since I’m a twin and I’m pretty sure there isn’t some curse that will end in our shared doom (fingers crossed) but it was all really enjoyable and the production was top-notch. Sadly for the production, the house was pretty empty, but luckily for my friends and I we were bumped from the Upper Circle to the Dress Circle as a result, so we had a better view of the stage.

On the docket for tomorrow I have 2 hours of neuro lecture and 2 hours of repro lecture, with time in the late afternoon to work on a group assignment. Another busy day, but I’m even looking forward to it.

Inspired by that ‘25 Things’ meme that seems to be spreading on facebook like very boring wildfire, I thought I’d share a bit of basic info about myself, so that those reading that aren’t family may have a better understanding of my point of view. How very dull.

1. I was born in September of 1986, which, at the time of writing this, makes me 22 years old.

2. Growing up I owned the following pets: 2 rats and 2 cats (one cat is still alive). Most of my fellow vet students seem to have come from a background where they were surrounded with animals, but not I!

3. I was one of those little girls that looooved horses, and despite my minimal exposure to them, decided very early on that I wanted to be a veterinarian just so that I could work with them.

4. In addition to being a vet (Plan A) a short list of other ‘callings’ that I briefly considered: writer, luthier, pilot in the air force (?!), film critic, cast member of SNL, and biochemist. Life might have been easier if I just decided I should be an accountant.

5. I rode horses for two years but never enjoyed it as much as I hoped I would. That said, lately I’ve been fantasizing about riding along the beaches of Scotland on some hardy pony. I think it’s time to get back into the saddle.

6. When I was young I used to put the cover down on the toilet, sit backwards on it, loop rope around the pipes and pretend that I was a jockey. Sadly I am about 8 inches too tall and many pounds too heavy to ever actually try to jockey.

7. I read voraciously as a child, all throughout high school, until I started Uni and completely fell out of the habit. Of all the things I miss about my childhood - and really, there aren’t many - I miss how much I used to enjoy reading.

8. That being said, I am also guilty of being the kid who read during recess instead of joining everyone on the playground. I’ve always been an introvert.

9. I have a wonderful family and I had a very happy, solid upbringing, neither of which I take for granted.

10. I won a school award in 8th grade because I had the top score on a geography exam. In hindsight, geography is a useless topic - I should have been a math genius.

11. I am always on the look-out for new music, but my tastes are very limited. Same with movies. I admit that I’m opinionated, but all the same time I can’t stand the thought of listening to music that I don’t want to hear, or watching movies I don’t have any interest in.

12. I have a Bachelor’s in Animal Science with a concentration in Equine Science, with a minor in Film Studies. Make of it what you will.

13. I am very, very much a night person - my brain is most active at about 10pm-1am. That being said, vet school is so exhausting that I aim to be in bed by 11pm, and and my brain is usually ready for bed at that time anyway.

14. Getting into vet school used to be my greatest achievement - I’ve recently realised that graduating would be even more impressive.

15. I spent one quarter at Univeristy (10 weeks) working with dairy cows, and decided halfway through that I wanted to work with them for the rest of my life and NOT horsies, thus negating 18 years of horse-love.

16. I have a twin sister - fraternal. We are nothing alike, and yet we get on perfectly.

17. I also have an older sister. I blame her for my well-developed sense of sarcasm.

18. My first time away from home, I was 17 and spent two weeks in France. It was possibly the most difficult 2 weeks of my life, but I still enjoyed it. I think I transitioned so easily to life abroad when I moved to Scotland because of my experiences when I was 17.

19. I played violin for 8 years in school, and then foolishly stopped when I was 18. I just gave up, which was a cowardly thing to do. I hit myself when I realise how much I might have learned in those 4 years I didn’t play and what sort of musician I would be now.

20. The worst injury I ever had was when I was sprained my ankle on Halloween in middle school. I over-emphasised my limp for the week I wore an ankle brace because I wanted people to pity my injury, but not a single person asked what had happened. Most likely they were put off by the weird girl who was limping everywhere for no apparent reason.

21. I used to eat strawberry jam and mustard sandwiches.

22. I once won 2nd prize in a writing contest that my city held for a short story about ‘Gypsies’ (Roma) during World War II. I got honorable mention the next year for an equally ridiculous story about disenfranchised youth trying to escape their small-town life.

23. I can never remember what 7 X 7 or 8 X 7 equals. I have to stop and count.

24. I pride myself in being a pretty good whistler.

25. I’m partially deaf in 1 ear, but I think I also have an exceptionally good sense of smell.