It’s hard to believe that I’m already starting my fourth week of my second year of vet school. I feel like time has already been flying- at the end of this week I’ll be a quarter of the way through the semester. It’s crazy.
I definitely feel better prepared this semester. I’ve learned how to study and juggle all my classes, so despite have more complicated classes and more class hours I feel much more on top of everything than I was last year. And actually being able to take some electives and enjoying certain classes does help time move along faster, but so does being proportionally more busy this year.
This semester I get to take clinical anatomy, bacteriology and mycology, pharmacology, clinical parasitology, and clinical pathology. I also get to take three elective- Signs and Symptoms, International Veterinary Medicine, and Equine Theriogenology. The electives finally give us the chance to specialize a bit in medicine that we’re interested in practicing, so they’re pretty much by default my favorite classes. That and the fact that they’re not as much work as the regular classes really gives them an unfair advantage. But overall, now that all of the basics are behind me all of the classes are more interesting, although some will always be better than others.
My two favorite classes are two of my electives, signs & symptoms and equine therio. What I love about the signs & symptoms elective is that for the first time it feels like I’m being trained to think like a vet. And what I mean by that is that instead of being taught specific diseases or parasites or bacteria and being told to memorize that this disease leads to theses symptoms and you do this treatment of this bacteria causes this disease that displays those symptoms (which is important, don’t get me wrong) we’re finally learning to think backwards. You’re not going to have a client come in and say “My dog has renal failure and that’s why he’s always thirsty and peeing a lot” and whatever else is wrong. That would be really nice, but it’s never going to happen. What you’re going to get is “my dog is anorexic and lethargic and I want to know what’s wrong.” And the fun part is that any kind of sickness is going to make an animal lethargic and anorexic, just like people get when we don’t feel good.
So the who point of this class is teaching you to think in a problem oriented approach. You have a dog that’s drinking a lot (which can be hard to tell anyway) and is peeing a lot. What diagnostic tests would you run to try and narrow down your differential? How do you interpret those results? Is it a thyroid problem or a kidney problem? What part of the organ is being affected? What diseases or infections could create that problem? How do I fix it? That’s how clinical practice is going to be, so it’s important to train your brain to think like that.
Equine Therio isn’t a lecture class, it’s a lab down at the vet med ranch, and it only lasts for five weeks. But I think I’ll actually learn more from this class than most of the others because its a practical class. For two hours once a week I go down to the vet med ranch and palpate mares. That’s all we do. Today was my first class, and I palpated about ten different mares until my arm felt like it was ready to fall off and was tingling every time I had it inside the mare. The professor of the class stresses that the only way to get good at it is by palpating thousands of mares, and after today’s class I definitely believe him. No one can tell you where anything is or what you’re feeling, all they can give you is a general idea of where things might be. On my first mare I felt like I couldn’t tell what anything was. After my fifth mare I could always find at least the right ovary, but about the seventh or eighth I could always find both, and I even found the ovulation fossa on one. By the ninth and tenth I thought I might have felt follicles, but I wasn’t sure. If I could make that progression over just two hours with ten mares, I can only imagine how good I’ll get after ten hours and fifty mares. And then I get to play with the ultrasound, something I’ve been wanting to learn to use for years. And this is all practical knowledge that I will use for my entire career. And the truth that every vet will tell you is that once you get out into clinical practice you forget everything that’s not directly relevant to your day to day job.
I think the other benefit to second year is the Introduction to Clinics course. For clinics we go over to the teaching hospital once a week a shadow a different rotation. So far I’ve had anesthesiology, where we practiced inserting catheters and taking blood from the jugular, and small animal surgery, which was really just a tour of the physical therapy ward and intensive care unit. I don’t know how informative this class is going to be, but we get to scrub in on surgeries to observe if there are any going on while we’re in the hospital, and I got to use the stim in the physical therapy ward on my neck for nearly forty-five minutes, which felt amazing.
I can already tell this year is going to be amazing and so much more interesting than last year.
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