Summertime...

It's ironic to me that after counting down for 16 straight weeks to get to my summer vacation I'm bored. I knew this would happen, so it's not too surprising, but it is annoying. Don't get me wrong, the first couple days of being able to sleep in until noon and spending the entire day in my pajamas was awesome. But now I'm itching to do something again. It's the same problem I had over winter break. After going non-stop for so long it's hard to just stop cold turkey. And in my boredom I've resorted to some very interesting past times... like buying leashes to take my lizards on walks and make a dress for Sydney to wear in my wedding. And no, I'm not joking. I have pictures to prove it.

And it doesn't help that I have too much time to spend on Facebook now, where I see posts from all the third years posting about their rotations. Well, they're fourth years now technically, which is insane. And they've already finished their first out of 16 rotations. Granted, a lot of their posts are about being tired and wanting to sleep, but they're also about awesome surgeries and cases and I cannot wait to get my hands on that. Sitting on the couch is definitely dull in comparison. I've considered buying some of my textbooks early to start reading them, just for fun, but I think that would make me just a little too much of a dork. But it's also dorky of me to do a happy dance at getting into the equine therio elective I wanted, so maybe it would actually work for me. Plus boredom and a laptop is a recipe for disaster, and by that I mean the temptation for online shopping. I've also been doing a lot of cooking, and as soon as I get some cupcake baking pans I'm going to work on nailing crazy decorated cupcakes shaped like penguins, horses, and spaghetti and meatballs.

If I'm sounding a little crazy, you wouldn't be the first to suggest that, so I won't be offended. I am just not meant to have a lot of free time on my hands. That's why I need the crazy schedule of vet school. Their craziness overrides mine.

I've been thinking a lot about calling up the Iowa tribes eagle rehabilitation center to volunteer, because I think that would be awesome. But after the wedding I need to concentrate on finding a paying job first. And then hopefully I'll be able to do that. And then maybe with a hectic job schedule and volunteering I'll feel normal again. But until then I guess I'm going to continue all my little side projects.

And just in case you didn't believe me... Sydney in her dress and going for a walk in the park.

1/4 DVM

I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’ve finished my first full year of veterinary school.

It feels so weird... I’m not really sure what to do with myself now. Yesterday I woke up at about one in the afternoon and started panicking, thinking that I’d overslept and lost half a day’s worth of studying before I remembered that I didn’t have anything left to study for. I’ve also been feeling guilty as I’ve been lazing around the house, feeling like I should be doing something productive and I’m going to regret it later. But aside from cleaning that I’ve been putting off and some wedding details to finalize, I really don’t have anything to do. I guess my mind just can’t wrap itself around that fact. 

But now that I’m getting more used to doing nothing I am enjoying it. But I’m also getting bored already. I’ll be good for a couple more days while I work my way through all of the Harry Potter books again, but then I’m going to need something else to do. Because I don’t think I’ll be able to do nothing for an entire semester. 

Hopefully I can find a summer job with one of the veterinarians out here for over the summer. At first I resisted that, thinking I’d had enough of vet school during the year and the last thing I wanted to do during my summer vacation was surround myself with vets. But I don’t know how to do anything else now. And I guess that’s a good thing- otherwise I’d be in the wrong profession.




And thank you to the second (now third) years, who were kind enough to decorate my car while I was taking my immunology final =]

On to the Next Step...

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 =]

Behind the Scenes at the OKC Zoo

I think my favorite club right now is the ZEW club. Overall, I think they have a lot of very interesting meetings and they offer a lot of unique opportunities. A couple days ago, one of those opportunities was to go to the Oklahoma City Zoo for a background tour of the veterinary hospital. I had been looking forward to this trip since the idea was first brought up a couple of months ago, so of course I was one of the first to sign up and I had been counting down the days since then.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect on this trip because we weren’t really given that much information about it, but it ended up being incredibly interesting and a lot of fun. One of the things that makes zoo medicine so challenging is that there just isn’t a lot of research out there about it, so a lot of things are still trial and error. And the other issue is that a lot of wild animals will never show clinical signs until the disease is very advanced, because in the wild those weaker diseased animals are the ones who are eaten. So a lot of the time the vets can’t catch something until it’s already too late. I was very interested to hear how zoo veterinarians deal with these issues, as well as the obvious you can’t just go into the tigers pen and give them a vaccination like you could a house cat.

The tour started with a demonstration of the darting methods used. Darting is using either a blow gun or a pressurized version to shoot a tranquilizer dart into an animal to sedate it long enough to work on it. The Oklahoma City zoo had a regular blow gun, for close range, a pistol version powered by pressurized CO2 for longer range and more force, and an assault rifle version also powered by CO2, that had a night scope and everything. The assault rifle is used pretty much exclusively long range on animals that you can’t get anywhere near to or for escaping animals. And the pistol is used for a more intermediate range or on animals like elephants and giraffes with especially thick skin, where a dart from a blow gun would just bounce off. The darts contain a sedative in a pressurized container, and the force of impact from hitting the animal released that pressure and pushes the sedative into the animal. It’s actually a pretty ingenious system. When it works, that is. And our tour guide, the director of the veterinarians at the zoo, was the first to tell us that it doesn’t always work. Sometime the animal has too much adrenaline pumping through its system, which cancels out the tranquilizer. Or sometimes the dart is faulty and the animal doesn’t get the whole injection. And then there is just the whole issue of not always knowing what type of medication would work best for a given species. The rule of thumb given to us was always use something reversible with a wide therapeutic range when you can. Reversible simply means that there is another drug available that will create the opposite effect of a given medicine, like if one drug drops blood pressure there is another that can be given to bring it back up. Not every drug is reversible though, and then you’re left with either trying to find some other way of creating the effects you need or you might lose the animal. And therapeutic range is the dose range of how much to give an animal based on their weight. Since most animals in a zoo are not exactly willing to step on a scale to let you get their weight, drugs with a higher therapeutic range means there is a lesser chance of overdosing that animal. Again, that is not always possible.

Since it is so much work to sedate these animals, zoo veterinarians typically only work on a specific animal about once a year, and while they have the animal under anesthesia they try to do everything that they need to do all at once time. This would include routine things like vaccinations and dentals as well as anything specific to that animal. But you still have to expect the unexpected. Apparently one monkey woke up while under anesthesia and bolted upright and ripped out its own intubation tube, and then went back to sleep. All because it didn’t like have that tube down its trachea. You just never know with zoo animals. I think that would have seriously scarred me for life though, and I’d probably be done working with monkeys.

We also got a look at the radiology department of the hospital, and we got to see some pretty cool radiographs from fish, frogs, birds, and a snake. I’m used to only seeing dogs, cats, and horses, so it was interesting to see the similarities and differences in some of the radiographs. And it was interesting to see how that knowledge from just dog and cat anatomy can be applied to other animals. And even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking at- like I was completely lost with the fish- usually you can still see something that isn’t quite right, even if you don’t know exactly what it is. Like I could see a huge fuzzy blob that I was pretty sure shouldn’t be there, but I just didn’t know it meant all that fish’s internal organs and ruptured out of the body cavity. I think a lot of that knowledge has to come from experience.

I think that if I were to become a zoo vet, the part that I would find the most difficult is accepting that you will make a ton of mistakes. A lot of them are just unavoidable. The vet giving us the tour told us how she accidentally wiped out an entire colony of tree frogs because she gave them ivermectin, and apparently those tree frogs can’t have ivermectin even though other frogs can. Some things like that aren’t predictable, because there’s no available research to tell you you can or can’t give certain medications to certain animals. A lot of zoo vets won’t try any type of new medications, preferring to let other people try them first and see how they work. Or you have to try it on one animal- as opposed to the entire colony- and see how they react before treating the other animals. There is so much uncertainty in this field regarding certain issues, and no one is really willing to be the first to try something new. At the same point, some zoo vets have close to 2,000 animals under their care every day, so it’s not like they have to time to run studies on zoo animals and medications. You just do the best that you can with the knowledge that you have, and you get creative and hope that it works.

At Oklahoma City Zoo, the veterinarians also oversee the diet of all the animals, and supplements are becoming a big thing for certain animals. We were told one of the most common things the vets are needed to treat is actually arthritis, because the zoo animals are living to such old ages, much older than they would in the wild. Although some animals, especially the monkeys, will pick out every extra supplement and pill hidden away in their food that they don’t want, adding to the challenge. You just have to hope that they don’t get all of it out and get at least a little of the medications or supplements. The budget for food for the animals at OKC zoo is close to $500,000 a year, most of it in fresh produce. 2,000 animals is a lot of animals to feed. And I need to interject something very important- don’t feed the animals at the zoo, and don’t toss things into their cages. Those animals have their diets very carefully regulated, and they do tend to eat foreign objects, probably out of a combination of boredom, curiosity, and hunger. We heard about a sea lion who died from copper toxicity because people kept tossing pennies into the pool, and he ate them all. Or animals ingesting water bottles and getting blocked and ruptured intestines. Besides the python we saw being treated for pneumonia there was radiographs of a snake that had tried to eat several trash items, including a water bottle, and when it couldn’t digest them and pass them it died. So please, don’t put anything into the animals pens. The fences and ditches are there for a reason. /end rant.

Overall, I learned a lot from this trip. It’s such a challenge to work with the more unusual species and not have any idea if what you are going to try and do will actually work or not. I don’t know if I could personally deal with that type of stress, so I have to really admire those who do.

Some pictures from the zoo

elephants = awesome

Tiger Cubs

cute little frog

Love the Galapagos Tortoises =]

Feeding mama

this little guy was so doing this for attention. He was posing and everything.

Anatomy Round 2

What’s better than cat and dog anatomy? Horse anatomy. Except for the book, horse anatomy (aka comparative anatomy) is so much better. But the book is useless. It doesn’t tell you how to do anything. Luckily, we’ve all retained a little bit of information from last semester, so we’re not completely lost, but I don’t think we retained as much as the book assumes we did.

This course is moving ridiculously fast though... each week we do another body section. We started with the head, and by week two the head was removed (to preserve for us to study later I believe) and we were moving on to the thorax. By week three we were on the abdomen and by week four we were on to the pelvis and the rest of the horse had been sawed off. Besides being intimidated by the fast pace and the amount of information I need to take in each week, I am a little confused about how I’m supposed to go into the lab and study when the majority of my horse is missing.

The main point of comparative anatomy is to highlight the differences between species, and the lab is almost like a just for the hell of it class. The dissection guide has us cutting through muscles and nerves to find deeper structures without any kind of explanation about what we’re cutting through. The motto of our group became “just cut that shit”, especially with trying to get the heart and intestines out. Every point of our dissection is just to note the differences between the horse and what we studied last semester with the dog. And I had heard that the lab portion of this class was really just an “additional learning experience” compared with the mostly lab based class with had last semester with dog and cat anatomy, but this is really just ridiculous. The majority of our first quiz’s questions didn’t have anything to do with actually locating anything on a horse. 

And while I actually am really enjoying dissecting a horse because the nerd in me thinks it’s awesome, I’m also annoyed that I spend 10 hours a week looking at things that I probably won’t be tested on, so I have to go back into the lab on my own time and learn everything else that I actually will be tested on. I just don’t get the system.

Plus, these horses weren’t preserved with formaldehyde like the dogs and cats were, so the lab needs to be kept at freezing temperatures in an effort to slow decay. You try carefully cutting through muscle with a scalpel sharp enough to cut through your own muscles a hell of a lot easier than it goes through horse muscles (remember, I know this firsthand) with fingers that you can’t even feel. Not fun. 

But what is fun is pulling out a horse’s ascending colon (the first part of the large intestine) and realizing that one segment alone (the right dorsal colon) is thicker than my thigh. Yes, yes, I know I have chicken legs, but it is pretty freaking huge. And the amazing part is that there is almost nothing holding that huge piece of intestine in place inside the abdominal cavity. Horses actually have unique abdominal fascia just to help their abdominal muscles support all the extra weight. That’s also why colic is such a problem in horses though. Out of all of that large intestine the colon is only anchored down in two spots, with the entire left hand side swinging free wherever it wants. I love horses, but that was not the smartest body engineering that I’ve ever seen. 

In addition to the horse, we’re also looking at an ox for this comparative anatomy course. I say just looking at because the sides have already been dissected with a couple of ribs removed so you can see the internal organs. We don’t dissect an ox, we just have to know certain things about it. I don’t know what those are yet, but I will figure it out before Thursday’s exam. Hopefully.

I think overall I like this class a lot more than last semester’s dog and cat anatomy, mostly because I’m dissecting a horse, but also because the dissections themselves are a lot less stressful. But I really with that I could get a useful anatomy dissection guide for  a change. That would be great.

our pony's heart

the ox pro-section

all the abdominal organs in situ

the cecum and ascending colon- the really huge part on the left is the right dorsal colon

what's left of our pony now- the pelvis. It does let you see the ovaries really well though

15 Rules For Visiting Your Veterinarian

1. Do not make an appointment. Just walk in, because they are going to be there anyway. Demand to be seen immediately! Become irate if you have to wait for anyone who was there ahead of you.


2. Bring all of your children. If you have no children, borrow some from a friend. Toddlers are best. Let them run around all over the hospital asking the staff a million questions.


3. Please ensure your mobile phone is turned on when you enter the consult room. Talk to everyone possible about what is happening to your dog/cat. Spend at least 10 minutes discussing this with them as well any other personal matters that come to mind.


4. As you leave, let your un-neutered dog urinate on every stationary object until you get outside. Do not tell anyone.


5. Please tell us if there is a problem, but wait at least 3 weeks to do so. Remember, continuous diarrhea for four weeks or more is considered "An Emergency Situation!". This is especially true at closing time on the weekends.
If you haven't brought your pet in to the hospital in two years, always tell the doctor the problem started RIGHT after the last visit and hasn't gone away.


6. Have your record under as many last names as possible. For your pet, have a registered name, a baptized name, and a nickname for each family member. Use a different one each time you come in for a visit.


7. When leaving your pet for boarding or any other procedures, never tell anyone in the office that you have changed your phone number since your last visit.


8. Never say anything important until the doctor put his/her stethoscope into their ears.


9. Always say, "Cost is not important! Just save my pet!"-- until you get the bill, then deny that you said it was OK to treat. Make a big fuss over every item even though you are not going to pay anyway.


10. If possible, always send your pet to the clinic with children under 18 years of age with no money or credit cards. Never tell them why they are bringing the pet in.


11. Complain about the cost of EVERYTHING. Stating that if you went to your doctor, you could get such and such procedure done for $100. Or that you will have to just "put your pet down" because you can't afford our prices.


12. Make sure you call an hour before closing to ask about having something done quickly (ex: express anal glands). Then, when you come in 10 minutes before closing, mention the huge list of other things you want to have looked at "since we're here anyway."


13. Make sure to never bring your dog in on a leash. It is best to let them run arround the parking lot and lobby without one. There is no need to be concerned about injury by cars or other pets.


14. Our Doctors' recommendations should not be heeded under any circumstances. They are just trying to con you out of your hard earned money. Feel free to waste an hour of our time and then decide you will take your pet home and "observe" him/her because you definitely know what is best.


15. When you believe that your pet may be in need of medication, it is not necessary to bring him/her in. Just call us on the phone and describe the injury/symptoms and we would be happy to diagnose the problem and prescribe medications for it. Of course, there will be no cost to you for the medicine, since your pet is not even our patient.

SIA- preservation through cultural understanding of the Eagle in History, Science, and Spirit

Now, this is why I love vet school. On Tuesday I had a ZEW meeting (zoo, exotics, and wildlife club), and the speaker was Bill Voelker from SIA, the Comanche ethno-ornithological collaborative (sia means feather in Comanche). He deals mainly with eagles, and he is one of the first people to really successfully use artificial insemination in eagles to raise babies in captivity and release them back into the wild. I have to say that before this I didn’t really have much of an interest in birds, but this was probably the most interesting club meeting that I’ve been to this year, except for maybe the one about treating the wild leopards and monkeys in India. 

To me personally, some of the most interesting aspects of SIA are its roots in Comanche culture. The reason this program was started was to help Comanches and other tribes get feathers from protected species that are integral to their culture, and from there it has turned into a breeding program for eagles, falcons, and other predator birds as well as a collection of artifacts and documents related to Comanche culture. 

I have always been interested in Native American cultures, so to me the stories were fascinating. And it also made it clear that there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of legal acceptance in the differences in culture, something else that SIA has had an active part in. But don’t get me started on that.

One of the stories was about Golden Eagles, and the different powers of the young golden eagle versus the older golden eagle (Comanches didn’t originally realize that the difference in the young and old eagles was due to age, they thought they were two separate birds). A young golden eagle has feathers with a white body and a dark tip, and then as the eagle ages the feathers turn entirely dark. So according to Comanche culture, feathers from a young golden eagle are especially powerful during the day, while feathers from a mature golden eagle are used during night time ceremonies, and both types of feathers have very powerful medicine. Golden eagle feathers are very highly sought after for these reasons, but it’s not like you can just pick up a couple of golden eagle feathers whenever you need them. And that was one of the goals of SIA, to be able to provide them and keep the Native American cultures alive. I just really love that they’re doing that.

I think the most incredible thing about SIA though has to be their breeding program. Bill said that for one golden eagle, they were able to get her to lay 16 consecutive eggs (by removing the egg each day so that the presence of the egg wasn’t able to send a message to her ovaries to essentially tell her to stop laying eggs), and out of those 16 eggs 15 of them hatched into baby golden eagles. That is much higher than laying and hatching rates for eagles in the wild. To me, that is just awesome. A couple of eagles are retained for their breeding program, but the rest of them are released back into the wild. Recently SIA has been working with the Tennessee Park Service and has been releasing a lot of eagles back into the wild in the smokey mountains. I forget how many eagles he said had been released back into the wild, but it was a lot. Several hundred, I believe. 

SIA is also now working with about 25 countries worldwide (I think- don’t quote me on the number) to implement conservation programs for avian wildlife native to those countries. I can’t remember if they are working on breeding programs with them or not, but conservation and understanding is always the first step. 

All in all, it was really a very informative and interesting speech. And if it wasn’t already good enough, Bill brought in two of his eagles from SIA to show us. One was a female ornate hawk eagle, and the other was a two year old male golden eagle. They were not people shy at all, but the golden eagle didn’t seem to be too big of a fan of being carried around the room. He kept spreading his wings and flying up as far as his leash would allow (he hit the one of the tv’s that are suspended above the desks- ouch!) and the gust power from his wings was unbelievable! It was like sitting directly in front of a fan on high power, except stronger... all the papers kept blowing, as did the paper plates and cups, and if there had actually been anything heavier on the tables I am sure they would have been blown to the floor too. It was awesome. And the golden eagle was a total ham. He kept posing for pictures. So I guess he has a love/hate relationship with this kind of thing... or he was just playing it up for drama. 

These two eagles were obviously going to become a part of the breeding program. You can’t release eagles who are so used to people back into the wild. So how do the eagles meant to be re-introduced into the wild get handled? SIA uses older eagles who don’t really lay eggs themselves anymore to act as nannies, and they raise the baby eagles, feed them, teach them to fly (they take them out and somehow do this from the back of a truck) and so on, until the birds can be released. And then the nanny eagles get a new crop of babies to raise. It’s a good system.

And if anything that I said sounds even remotely interesting, then you should check out www.comancheeagle.org. I will admit that the website isn’t the most impressive that I’ve seen, but they’ve got some cool pictures, and you can learn a little more about what they do. I am hoping to be able to go down and visit SIA headquarters sometime while I am still here in Oklahoma. I think it would be really interesting to volunteer with them for a summer.

Bill Voelker with a female ornate hawk eagle

an ornate hawk eagle

a 2 year old male golden eagle

the white tail feathers of young golden eagle

this sort of gives an idea of the immense wing span of a golden eagle