Long time no blog

Since I've been on break, I haven't had too much to write about... But now I do! So I will.

On Thursday night, I went up to the Large Animal Hospital for my first clerk duty shift. Basically, clerk duty is just a chance to follow people around the hospital and help take care of the critters late at night. Everyone in the hospital gets checked on every hour, 24 hours a day. I got there around 5:30 and found the tech who was on duty. She told me about all the cases they had in, and we walked around and checked on everyone. There were two very sick little calves, a few horses, a cow, and an alpaca. We spent most of our time watching one of the calves, because after doing some bloodwork on her, the doctors warned us that "she could crash and burn any time". Eek! Pressure! She was fine at the end of my shift, so I hope she made it through the night okay...

Anyway, I got to learn a few things and review a few things. The tech tried to let me draw blood on a horse, but I couldn't get it- and then she couldn't get it either, which made me feel a little better. I took a lot of TPRs (temp, pulse, respiration rate), which we learned how to do in clinical skills. I was surprised at how relatively easy it was to hear the pulse on the horses... I remember having such a hard time hearing it distinctly when we were learning. So yay, I've made improvement! I reviewed how to take a PCV and total protein, which was good timing because when I went to deliver a senior student some meds for his case, he handed me a blood sample and asked if I knew how to run those tests. Why yes I do (as of 5 minutes ago...), no problem, I'll just run those for you... Mwaha. I got to look competant! He and I chatted a little, and he thought it was really funny that I bred rabbits for show. "A show rabbit breeder? Don't meet one of those every day!"

The rest of the night was just giving hay to horses and cows, and watching that little calf to make sure she was still breathing. Thankfully she never stopped breathing, and she even ate her dinner, so hopefully she'll make it.

So that was my adventure in clerk duty. I have two more shifts over the next semester...

We got almost all of our grades now... Here's where I stand:

Orientation to Vet Med: pass
Professional Skills I: pass
Animal Populations I: pass
Veterinary Gross Anatomy: B
Normal Radiographic Anatomy: A
Veterinary Physiological Chemistry: B
Histology: B
Nutrition: still waiting
Clinical Skills I: in progress
Neonatology: in progress

I am a little miffed at Histo, because I had an 89.3% or something like that... so so so close to an A, couldn't they have been nice and rounded up?? *sigh* The others I'm happy with. I was aiming for Bs, so I did pretty well. It's strange that they only give us straight A, B, C, rather than A-, B+, etc. It doesn't seem very representative that an 80% earns the same grade as an 89%. I shouldn't be so picky, but when residency and internship programs are basing your acceptance on your GPA, why would schools give us less-descriptive grades? For me, the difference between a B- and a B+ is often the difference between taking it kind of easy and working really hard. :-/ Whatever, I won't question authority...

I have another brag that won't show up on my transcript- on the last biochem test, I got a 97%. 97%!!! Holy cow. That's the best I've done on a test in years. Who'd have thought it would be in biochem, where ironically I got the worst test grade I've gotten in years as well? Apparently re-listening to lectures worked well for that class. Maybe I should buy my own voice recorder so I can stop stealing Becca's audio files.

"Habits of Production" opened last night, but I think Chris gets to post about that whole adventure...