The Halfway Point

It's been a while since my last blog post. With at least one exam a week for the past 12 weeks, it becomes a little difficult to mark time in any way besides the exam I need to study for next. But I needed to take a minute to celebrate the fact that I am halfway through vet school.

Yes, I've actually made it to the halfway point. Only 6 days and 5 exams stand between me and my last ever summer vacation. Which is a slightly depressing thought, but is followed quickly by the realization that there is just one more year of lectures and one year of clinical rotation and I am DONE.

I am really looking forward to getting to the rotations. Every time I have to take one of my lizards I am inwardly jealous of the fact that these students are already in the final stages of school. And this might sound weird, but I like to pretend I know nothing about veterinary medicine when I go in just so I can get a feel for how they handle normal clients. I like to know what to expect and to be prepared. And not to make any current fourth years on rotation nervous, but I like to observe how they handle things and then decide how I would want to do things, whether similar or different.

While I am excited and proud of myself for coming this far, there is a bit of nerves starting to sit in. I feel like I have been concentrating for so long on just going to vet school and becoming a vet that I don't really know what to do with myself once I'm actually a vet. Is that strange? I mean, I had the dream of owning my own equine practice, and getting certified in acupuncture and chiropractic work, but I've had so many other opportunities through school that I guess I'm not entirely sure what I want to do anymore. I would still be happy and grateful to be able to run my own equine clinic, but I also feel like I want to do more in terms of exotics and zoo species too. And hopefully after my experience in South Africa working in Kruger National Park, I'll have a better idea of what line of medicine I want to go into. But the more I read, the more I am interested in trying to go into more of a conservationist line of work. Something like the Green Sea Turtle Rehabilitation Hospital, or working with the PAWS elephant sanctuary. Something where I feel like I could help animals that are usually ignored.

But I still have a lot of time to figure all that out. It's just that as another year comes to a close and I'm one step closer to being thrown out into "the real world", I can't help but wonder where I'll end up. But I think I'm just going to let life happen as it will. Once I'm back in school I'll have too many exams to worry about things like that anyway.

On top of studying for finals, I am also putting the finishing touches on my plans for Africa. I just started taking the oral typhoid vaccine, which is a live vaccine, so I'm really hoping my immune system and stress level can handle that right now and I won't get sick. I also had to get the vaccine for Hepatitis A, and I start taking anti-malaria pills in about 2 weeks. Going to Africa definitely requires a lot more than just the standard Motrin I normally pack. But it's all going to be worth it, because I definitely don't want to come down with malaria. And I know that if anyone would, it would be me. I also plan on taking about 3 bottles of bug spray with me just to be on the safe side.

I can't believe that in one month I'll be boarding my flight for Johannesburg. I can't wait to get my hands dirty and start learning all about wildlife medicine. At this point, the only slight reservation I have is that I won't want to leave Africa. And I am determined to see elephants, and preferably to work on one and help one. That would pretty much make my life. There is always so much that I want to do to help them in this poaching plight, but it always feels like there is so little I can actually do. Now is my chance to really dive in and make a difference, and I can't wait.

I plan on updating this blog as frequently as I can while I'm in South Africa, so keep your eyes open for some hopefully interesting updates on what I'll be doing! I plan on taking as many pictures as I can as well, or as many as I can while trying to work on an animal at the same time. If all else fails, I'll recruit my husband to take pictures while I work.

Now that I've procrastinated long enough writing this, I guess it's time to get back to studying for my radiology final on Monday. Wish me luck!

Open House

Today was open house at the Vet School! If you have any interest in the veterinary profession, this is the time to come out and see what we're all about. All the club's set up demonstrations to help educate the public about what it is we do. 

The first place I had to drag my husband, obviously, was to the anatomy lab. The anatomy lab had radiographs up all along the walls, as well as dried specimens and bones, and some transverse sections. So it's a good way to show people some things without completely grossing them out. That's what the pathology section next door was for, anyway. My favorite display, of course, was the elephant section. There is a giant elephant front leg set up from the scapula down to the toes, and then they also had a femur and a skull. I've never seen an elephant skull up close like that before, so that was pretty cool. And it showed what I had read about, that an elephant's brain actually sits much lower in the skull than our's does. So where we have brain behind our forehead, behind an elephant's forehead is just soft tissue and blood.

An elephant's front leg. As you can see, it's taller than me, and I'm 5'7.

An elephant's skull, from the side and from the back

A radiograph of a snake who has ingested something he probably should have, and of a leopard gecko.



Then of course we hit up the pathology section in the old necropsy lab, where they had some diseased organs out on display. We skipped by the parasitology section, which had some microscopes set up to view parasite eggs and some boxes with live ticks, because I am just not a fan. My husband did correctly identify Ixodes scapularis as the tick that spreads lyme disease (he didn't know the actual name, but major points for visual recognition, since that's what's important!).

In the old necropsy room, they had a llama's liver, the stomach of a dog, and the intestines from a zebra. All my husband said of this part was that it smells, and he was disgusted that I was standing next to him eating potato chips. But honestly, I don't even notice it anymore. The liver from the llama was enlarged and had been invaded by a metastatic cancer, and so it had all these raised nodules all over it. The dog had some internal bleeding, and the stomach and intestines were practically black from coagulated blood. The zebra had a parasite problem with roundworms. So yeah, I guess if you weren't used to it I could see how that might be a little unsettling. To me it's just cool, especially when it's from slightly more exotic animals, like a zebra. And I say slightly because they are essentially horses.

Llama liver

Next we headed over to the hospital, where the majority of the displays were. Right as you walked into the hospital there was a demo of 2 horses painted, one with a skeleton and the other with the digestive tract of a horse. It's a great way to see the differences and similarities between our own bodies and theirs.

Showing the skeleton of a horse                                    

Showing the digestive tract of a horse

The ZEW club had out its boa constrictor and some guinea pigs to look at, but I think one of the highlights, at least for me, was the Iowa Tribe's Grew Snow Eagle House demonstration. They brought down a couple of their birds- a Red Tailed Hawk and a Golden Eagle. Their program takes in wounded birds and tries to release them back into the wild. The golden eagle had a broken wing, and would never be able to fly again. They always try to reset the bones, but I guess you can't really wrap a wing that well to keep it immobilized so the bones can heal properly.

I learned a lot about raptors today though. Like that a Red Tailed Hawk can fly up to 600 miles in a day, and that if you have a problem where a hawk is going after some of your animals and you somehow capture it and drive it 500 miles a way, that hawk can be back within the same day. And that they have two eyelids, one of which is transparent, so that they can close it while flying to keep their eye from drying out and to keep crap from getting in there. Same with their nose- they actually have a bone in their tongue that lets the cover up those nostrils from inside their mouth to keep their mouth from drying out. I also never realized that raptors could control each feather individually- that's a whole lot of muscle control- and they use that ability to express different emotions with their feather placement. And just like how a horse has the patellar locking mechanism to lock their legs, a raptor (not sure if all birds have this) have a similar tendon locking mechanism in their talons, so that when they grab a hold of something they can lock their talons around it. I believe the Red Tailed Hawk could grab and lock with something like 600 pounds per square inch, and the Golden Eagle could grab with 1500 pounds per square inch. So, lesson of the day- even through those thick leather gloves falconers wear, those raptors could squeeze through them if they wanted and completely crush your hand, and then lock their talons closed and there wouldn't be anything you could do about it.

Red Tailed Hawk

Golden Eagle

A couple of other demonstrations up that we didn't really spend too much time at were the anesthesiology demonstration and the teddy bear surgery. For the anesthesiology section, they hooked a teddy bear up to a ventilator so people could get an idea of how all of the machines work. And for teddy bear surgery, kids get to bring in their stuffed animals and then have them "fixed" surgically. Kids get to dress up in the surgery gowns and masks, and I think a little heart gets sown inside the teddy bear, and the teddy gets sown up and wrapped with vet wrap, all while demonstrating proper surgical procedure. It's a great way to show kids one of the cooler aspects of medicine.

The anesthesiology set up

All in all, it was a great way to spend a couple of hours and take a much-needed break from studying!

The Art of Radiology

I have to say that radiology is probably the class I was dreading the most. Even after a year and a half of anatomy and studying radiographs, I still felt like I had no idea what I was looking at. Usually I just stared blankly at the radiograph and hoped that it would somehow speak to me and tell me what I should be seeing, because I definitely wasn't seeing it on my own. So going into this class I had very low expectations, and was just praying I would be able to see enough to get through.

I have to admit though, I am pleasantly surprised. It's amazing how much more enjoyable radiology can be when you're taught how to actually read them and how to notice any abnormalities. Now, that's not to say that I'm a master at reading radiographs after a month of classes, definitely not. I still have my fair share of radiographs where I can stare at them for half an hour, my professor is telling me "This is a perfect example of this disease" and I'm not seeing it. It's just not happening. It's not there. Sometimes I wonder if staring at radiographs for too long can make you start hallucinating and seeing fuzzy shapes and blurry marginations that aren't actually there.

But then there are things I can see, even if it did take me a while, and I am so happy that I'm finally understanding SOMETHING that I'm really not to worried about the rest right now. A month into classes and I can pretty reliably find the cranial and caudal arteries and veins on every radiograph (barring those with an alveolar pattern where it is so opaque you can't see any vessels at all), I can see bronchi, I can evaluate the trachea and heart for any abnormalities, and I can evaluate different lung patterns. Coming off of anatomy where all I could do was look at bones and it took me forever to try and determine abdominal organs within a haze of white, I think I'm doing pretty good.

Now, can I tell you what all of those morphologic changes actually means? Not yet. But after Friday I will, because I have to learn it all by then. But one step at a time. And the more difficult part is sometimes all you can see is an enlarged vein, and that might be your only clue of venous congestion. And in some diseases only the arteries are enlarged, in some it's only the veins, and in some it's both. I'm confident that those are logical changes occurring from the disease process so I'm not as worried about learning that, I'm just happy I can see what an enlarged or small vessels looks like now, since before I couldn't tell and all I had to go off of was "the vessels should not be larger than the minimum diameter of the 4th rib." Because that was really helpful when I couldn't even see the vessels.

Here are two radiographs from a normal thorax. The heart and diaphragm are obvious in white, and all the black is lungs. In radiographs, "we see what we see in the chest because of air in the lungs", which provides enough contrast to be able to see vessels and masses. So in this image, all the black between the hear and ribs is lung field, and those white squiggly lines are different vessels. The issue comes when you have some kind of pulmonary disease that causes there to be less air in the lungs, because then you lose your contrast and the vessels can't be seen as well. That's one of the areas I'm still working on.

In this lateral view, the trachea is the slightly thick black line coming down over the heart. A more opaque (whiter) thick line can be seen crossing the trachea from the top of the heart, which is the descending aorta. The shadow, known as summation, caused by the overlapping trachea and aorta can tell you if those two structures are in the correct position. The thicker white line leaving from the back of the heart and heading to the diaphragm is the caudal vena cava. I can also see the cranial lob artery and vein in the cranial portion of the heart. The artery and vein are white and parallel, and the cranial bronchi is the blacker line between them. And this heart shape is pretty good. To look for disease in this view, you would look for increased sternal contact or how it meets the diaphragm.

Overall, I'm surprised at how much I'm actually enjoying learning how to read radiographs, but I guess things are always more enjoyable when you actually know what you're doing. And now that I've got reading the normal radiographs down pretty well, it's time to work on the ones I'll actually be seeing in my career. The non-normal, messed up ones.

Kanjoro's Graduation

A couple of months ago I decided to foster two elephant orphans in Kenya, Kanjoro and Quanza. Recently Kanjoro has graduated to the next stage in his rehabilitation into the wild by moving to Ithumba. Ithumba is the next step in the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust's rehabilitation program, where elephants gain exposure to the wild herds in Tsavo National Park.

This is an important step in the reintegration, as baby elephants learn bush etiquette from the matriarch and older females in the herd, or in the case of bulls like Kanjoro, from older bulls in the bachelor herds. Ithumba gives the orphans a chance to interact with all of the ex-orphans and their wild friends, who frequently turn up when new orphans arrive at Ithumba, and this interaction provides the orphans with their bush etiquette training. It is also important that they make friends within the wild herds, as elephants are very social creatures.

While this is a great step in the right direction, it will still be several years before Kanjoro is no longer dependent on his keepers and his milk feedings. Elephants mature at the same rate as humans, so at almost three years old he is much older than the other nursery orphans but very much still a baby. But he is reaching that age where he was beginning to test his strength against other bulls, and so he needed to be moved to Ithumba to be with other orphans closer to his own size.

There is an update on Kanjoro's relocation on the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust's website, here  Kanjoro's Relocation. Apparently Kanjoro is a nervous traveler and tried to make a break for it when he first arrived at Ithumba, before stopping and returning to the familiar keepers. He will settle in soon, as moving to Ithumba always reunites the orphans with all of their old friends who made the move before them, and an elephant's memory is longer than ours and they can remember other elephants they haven't seen for years or even decades. And then they tend to greet each other with loud rumblings and trunk kisses.

I am happy that Kanjoro is doing so well and was able to move on to this next stage of his life without mishap. Soon he will begin testing his strength against the other bulls at Ithumba that are similar in size to him, and within a couple of years he should be able to fully integrate back into the wild.

Kanjoro on the moving truck with Kilabasi

Kanjoro on the truck

Kanjoro running off the truck and heading to the keepers with his milk

Settling in

The Poaching Wars

As part of my preparation to go to Africa, I have been trying to keep up to date with wildlife news, especially regarding the elephants, and how they have been faring in the poaching wars. So far it's not too good.

I don't think the poaching problem in Africa has been portrayed as a real problem to the general public. The majority of poaching is done to fuel the growing demand in the East, especially China, where a rising middle class uses ivory trinkets as a status symbol. But it's been shown that the majority of Chinese people- one paper said about 70%- don't have any idea that elephants have to die to remove the tusks. They think the tusks simply fall off the elephants as part of a natural process and that they can be collected off the ground. How can we decrease demand from the major source of increased poaching when the majority of the people creating the demand are so uneducated about ivory?

It is believed that 25,000 elephants were killed by poachers in 2011. The number is expected to be even higher for 2012. Already in 2013, less than one month in, 12 elephants have already been killed in Kenya in one of the worst single poaching incidents in that country. One of those 12 elephants killed was a two month old baby, who didn't even have any ivory to poach. At this rate, so conservationists have claimed that elephants may be extinct from the wild within 20 years.

The elephant has always been a majestic symbol linked to Africa. It's hard to think of an Africa without elephants. They aren't even just linked to Africa alone anymore, they are part of the human culture. When teaching kids the alphabet, it's always "e is for elephant". We decorate nurseries with cute blue and pink elephant prints. At this rate, we are going to be teaching our kids to love an animal that is only going to be found in a small number of zoos, where their  natural majesty and beauty can't be appreciated the way it could be in the wild.

But it's more than just the fact that human greed is trying to extinguish yet another species. This is a species that is supposed to have the lifespan as a human, with the same, if not better, capacities for memory and emotion. Baby elephants orphaned by poaching incidents will stand guard over their fallen families until rescued- if they are lucky enough to be found- where they then usually sink into a deep depression and refuse to eat and lose the will to live. One of the greatest things about the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Orphanage is that it allows these grieving elephants to be comforted by others in the same position as them, and usually it is not until these new orphans are comforted by their fellow orphan survivors that they begin to turn the corner. It is nothing short of tragic and despicable that entire families are ripped apart for mere trinkets.

The poaching problem isn't going to get any better until there is a rise in public awareness and there is a shift that makes elephant lives worth more than ivory chopsticks. And I don't want to give the wrong impression here, either- rhinos are dying at alarming rates the same as elephants. I don't know as much about their crisis other than they are also facing extinction if the poaching doesn't stop. One new technique with rhinos is to capture them and saw off their horns before the poachers can shoot them and do it themselves. Of course, while this saves the rhinos life from poaching, it leaves them defenseless against other rhinos and other predators. There is no good answer for this other than to crack down on poaching.

It is upsetting that humans value money more than other life. But until more people are aware of how bad the situation is, nothing is going to change. In the words of Dr. Seuss, "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

one of the orphans with one of the keepers at the DSWT orphanage

some of the elephant orphans at the DSWT Orphanage

Wildlife Wine Tasting Fundraiser

The Wildlife Wine Tasting Fundraiser was last Thursday, and overall I'm pretty happy with how it went! Everyone had a great time, and while wine costs kept us from raising as much as we would have liked, at least we weren't in the red! We wouldn't have been able to pull this off without all of the support from local Stillwater business, and thank you to everyone who came out to support us!

I think organizing this fundraiser was a good learning experience, and there are a lot of things I would do differently next time around to try and make other fundraisers more successful. There is a lot more that goes into planning an event like this than I originally thought, and a lot of details in the last minute organizing and finalizing. I am considering doing a similar event again in the spring, but as a beer tasting instead of a wine tasting. I think that may appeal to more people, and keep overhead costs down. I'll have to see how this semester goes, but as always I'll keep this blog updated with my fundraising attempts!

Wine bottles ready for the wine pool

Our raffles, silent auctions and wine pool

Mini cupcakes provided by Cake Crazy LLC. Delicious!

Truffles from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory

Wine Tasting!

Raffle winners!

Raffle winners!

Drawing raffle winners

Raffle Winners!

Some of the damages from the night

Back Again

It's been a while since my last blog post, which isn't surprising because I always disappear for a while around finals, and then with break it's always crazy. But I can't believe I'm starting my second semester of my second year of veterinary school... it feels like time has been flying by. It definitely feels like it's going by faster than my undergrad, which felt faster than high school. Each successive 4 year block of school feels shorter than the last.

This semester is going to be interesting. I'm already lost in my diagnostic imaging class. I'm not too surprised about this, and I was expecting it. It will help make this semester interesting though. I think I'm going to enjoy my clinical neurology elective and virology class, although I know that will be extremely time consuming for me. If you're wondering which classes I get to take this semester, I have Epidemiology, Food Safety and Public Health, Virology, Pharmacology (again), Anesthesiology, Diagnostic Imaging, Hemolymphatic/Oncology System, Clinical Neurology, Lab Animal Medicine, and Zoonotic Diseases. That's a lot. I'm just hoping I can learn some lizard anatomy and physiology in my lab animal course.

I've also been continuing to work hard on my fundraising efforts. My next fundraiser, a Wildlife Wine Taster, is coming up this Thursday! I've had some early ticket sales, and I'm hoping a lot of people come out to help support us. We've had a lot of support from local businesses in the Stillwater area, and they have really helped me with their contributions. We'll have chocolates from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, baguettes from Panera, and cupcakes from Cake Crazy LLC to go along with our wine tasting. We've also had donations from The Links at Stillwater, The Funnies Comedy Club, Tan and Tone, The Uniform Stop, Summit Co, Downtown Marketplace, Rhinestone Cowgirl, Murphy's Department Store, Reese Chiropractic, DuLaney's Retail Liquer Store, Brown's Bottle Shop, Stillwater Wine and Spirits Warehouse, and JR Liqueur for both raffle baskets and a wine pool. I was so surprised by the outpouring of support from the Stillwater community for our fundraiser, and I am hoping that all of these donations will really help the wine tasting be a success.

I have also paid the deposit for the Africa program, so I will officially be going this summer! I am so excited to learn about wildlife medicine, and I am hoping I can get the chance to work with the elephants and make a difference in the conservation effort. I've been reading a book called "The Elephant Whisperer", and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in conservation in general or elephants in particular. I am also considering continuing my bake sales, since they were so successful, and donating the profits to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. As soon as I can figure out if I am actually allowed to do this on campus I'll be starting that back up.

I can already tell it's going to be a busy busy year, but it always is in vet school! At this point, I don't think I would know what to do with my extra time if I didn't have any extra projects going on!