It’s been a while since my last update, so now that the semester is over I’ve decided it’s time for another one. This year feels like it has gone by so fast; I only have one week of finals left and I will be done my first year of vet school and officially 1/4 of a vet. Unbelievable, isn’t it?
I don’t know that anything really exciting has happened. Especially at the end of a semester you mark time by exams, by what you have to study and when you have to study. A social life is pretty nonexistent. Just in the last 2 weeks of class I had 4 exams one week, 2 lab finals plus 2 quizzes in my official last week, all to be followed by 5 finals the next week. It begins to take over your life.
One nice break was the foal watching team I was a part of. Basically you are on call two weekdays and one weekend day a month, and if any mares or foals come into the hospital for any reason you get called in for a couple of hours to watch them. I only got called in once this semester, but I went in a couple times on my own to help. The foals are just so cute and irresistible! Some come in because they won't nurse and need blood/antibody transfusions, some were in because of difficult births, and some came in just in case. Our hospital is one of the only ones in the area, so we get to see a wide variety of cases. Foal watching really just involves a lot of watching, but I enjoy it all the same. Mostly we note times of nursing, if that's the problem, or help collect blood or urine for tests. Sometimes all we had to do was make sure the foal didn't get tangled up with its IVs. I thought about applying as an emergency tech at the hospital, but in the end I decided I'm too exhausted as it is to get called in at 2 in the morning or have to work overnight shifts. Maybe when I get these studying habits under my feet a little bit better.
But even with the lack of sleep, I am so glad that I’m here, and so excited for next year! I got to pick out some electives this time, so in addition to my core classes (clinical pathology, clinical parisitology, infectious diseases, and clinical anatomy) I get to take a class called signs and symptoms, which is all about case studies and learning how to piece together a diagnosis, and a class called international veterinary medicine, which is about cultural differences in the work that veterinarians perform. I also get to take intro to clinics, which will be my first regular time in the teaching hospital! I’ll get to spend one afternoon a week moving around to the different wards and rotations and seeing exactly what we’ll be doing in our fourth year. This is probably the class I am most excited for, because it will be one of the first times we actually get to act like a practicing veterinarian. I mean, it will probably be a lot like all the shadowing I did to get all my hours in the first place, but I’m sure I’ll still get to see a lot of really interesting cases! I’m still hoping to get into an equine therio class too, which would be ultrasounding mares and all that fun stuff for a couple of weeks. Next year with these electives is really the first time we’ve been able to pick out classes that suit our particular interests, so I am really looking forward to these classes. There are a ton of equine ones I want to take, as well as some wildlife and exotics classes. And then you can take advanced surgery electives, internal medicine, animal shelter medicine, and so on. The list is pretty much never ending. Right now my problem is deciding what I want to take most without completely killing myself with the amount of credit hours I'll have. I am also debating a trip to Africa for a month to work during the summer for some credit. I think that would be an amazing experience, to be able to work with different people and some real wild and different animals. We'll see how the financial situation is looking, but there are always externships in my final year, too.
Next year will also be the start of our student chapter of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association Club! It’s looking like I’m going to be the fundraising chair, and I am so excited to be a part of this club! Alternative medicine, specifically acupuncture and chiropractic work, is what I have always wanted to specialize in, so I cannot wait for the opportunity to listen to practitioners and researchers in this field talk to us next year. It’s going to be awesome.
I thought my first year of vet school was amazing, with all my new experience working with baby animals, castrating goats, dissecting ponies, and all the traveling I got to do. But I can see that each successive year is going to get better and better. These electives already make next semester look better, and listening to the second years talk is getting me so excited for my surgery class in third year. And then of course there was the white coat ceremony for the third years who are entering the hospital next week for clinical rotations, which is a huge milestone. There is so much to look forward to! If I wasn’t counting on this break from studying so much I would be ready to start immediately. But summer vacation will probably go by faster than I want it too, and then it’ll be back to the grindstone and one step closer to being a veterinarian!
This was one of the foals I watched =]
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