2013: Resolutions by the Month

I used to make New Year's resolutions. Being the sort of person that I am, I like the idea of setting a goal, working toward it and (hopefully) achieving it within a certain time frame. However, not unlike gummy bears (or chocolate chip cookies, or ponies, or Christmas presents, or shoes...), you can't have just one. So, excited about the promise of a new year and further encouraged by everyone around me, I would make a few resolutions (known by the hip-and-with-it crowd as "NYR").

Everyone felt obligated to make losing weight their number one resolution- as though putting it first on the list would somehow help- and I floated with that crowd a few times. Then, "being healthy" (which is secret slang for "lose weight but won't be discouraged when it doesn't happen") became the next big NYR, and I could agree with that, so that would make my list. I put other things down too, mostly to do with studying more or saving money.

Pretty much all of it failed. I know, I know, it sounds sad and pathetic but I'm over it. I stopped making NYR for a few years because I'm the sort of person that likes to set a goal and accomplish it and it would make me feel kind of dejected to have set out to do something and not finished it. Something like having no expectations saves you from disappointment- however that quote goes.

But this year I came up with something different: I decided that I would set a new resolution each month. Instead of being some vague like "lose weight" or "save money", I would make goals that were somewhat more quantifiable. And instead of being things purely for myself (although I won't say every resolution is completely selfless), I'm hoping I'm able to be a better person by accomplishing each of the mini-resolutions.

January's resolution was to be a better friend. It doesn't seem obviously quantifiable, but each "act" was a bit of a mental notch for me to remember. I don't need to go into detail (that would pretty much defeat the point of being more selfless, haha). Suffice to say that I feel like I reached my goal to be a better friend :) It feels good to set and reach that first goal- probably the first NYR I can remember actually accomplishing! Now, for the next one... I've waffled on February, but I think I've decided that my next mini-resolution will be to eat less meat. I think this will be an interesting one, since I've considered going full-out vegetarian intermittantly the past few years. In the back of my head I do have...moral qualms? about eating meat the way it is traditionally produced. I think I will feel like a better person if I can get myself to eat in a way that is compatible with my view points on production animals, their welfare, their impact on the environment, etc. Bonus- this will force me to try new recipes, which was runner-up for February's resolution. So here's to February 1st- let's hope I can keep it up!

Stress

I mentioned earlier that not having anything interesting to blog about is a real writer's block. Well guess what? So is stress!

My first midterm (pharmacology) is on Friday. I studied very briefly (and pretty ineffectively) yesterday because we had a quiz in tutorial for cardiovascular pharmacology today but other than that, I haven't touched the material. And yet my motivation for the first test of the semester is painfully elusive. I feel more like I'm at the end of the semester than the beginning.

Wedding planning isn't going as smoothly as it had been because, surprise surprise, real life has reared its ugly head and my family and fiance are occupied with a variety of other things. Which is understandable, but still frustrating for me. I feel guilty for feeling frustrated, though, because they are being such a critical help to me while I'm up here in Canada.

Summer plans are the last big source of stress right now. Fortunately I have summer plans, but nailing down/hashing out the details is a bit tedious as well as time consuming and right now, I really don't have the time! But I know if I don't put in the effort now, I'll wish I had.

So onward I trudge, doing my best to juggle everything and blog about it while I'm at it.

Miscellaneous

Nothing very exciting has happened since the last time I posted. My birthday was yesterday, and it was a great birthday. I got flowers and food and went out to dinner for sushi, which was delicious. I'm having a birthday fiesta at my house tomorrow since my parents got me a bunch of Mexican food stuff for Christmas (taco seasoning, etc). I need to clean the house, study for my first midterm (pharmacology) and do laundry this weekend, which is pretty boring. I'm also intending to do some wedding planning stuff this weekend too.

Surgery

In vet school, heaven forbid anyone ever "know" what they want to do when they graduate- all anyone ever tells you is how you're going to change your mind. Well, I'll be honest with you, I have changed my mind a lot since I became genuinely interested in vet med (and by that I mean not a three year old girl who loved ponies) but ever since I worked as a laboratory animal technician at my undergraduate campus, I've decided I want to pursue lab animal. This past semester I gained more interested in public health, as well, but overall, I'm taking steps to enter the field of lab animal medicine. As committed as I am to LAM, I think almost all veterinary fields are ones that I could see myself being relatively content in.

All except surgery.

I'm not squeamish: I have no aversion to blood or guts. I have no problem with things that bleed or ooze or smell bad. I understand the importance of surgery and I acknowledge that surgeons are probably some of the most intelligent and skilled professionals in all of vet med. They have that something about them that is borderline arrogant (sometimes way past borderline) and yet gives you total confidence in their knowledge and ability to dive into your animal's body and fix something. I just have absolutely zero interest in being that person.

I don't want to scrub my hands and forearms raw for ten minutes, wrestle with the seemingly endless acoutrements of a surgeon's uniform, worry about what (or who) the hell I can or cannot touch. I don't want a patient's life to ride on whether or not I remembered to flip a little switch or ligate a certain vessel or turn fifty different dials the right way the first time. I don't want to have to remember my anatomy in exquisite detail, most of all. I just...don't want anything to do with surgery. Today's principles of surgery lab reminded me of that, even though I did have a good time. And next year I'll have to do some surgery and I'll man-up and get it done; I might even have to do some surgery as a lab animal vet. But specialize in operating all of the time? No thank you.

Weekend

Back home, I'm usually quite productive on weekends. Up here, I'm pretty lazy. I got home from board game night around midnight last night, slept in and then didn't feel so well this morning (not hungover, I promise!) so I lounged around in bed until about noon. I talked to my mom (as I do every weekend) and then did some more nothing. It's hard to feel motivated when you're bundled up inside, cozy and warm, as it snows outside your window. At least it's warmer today than yesterday- my car thermometer (which doesn't register wind-chill) read 0F on my way home last night! I should probably do some more wedding planning and start studying for my pharmacology midterm in two weeks time, but we'll see. Football tomorrow, too, so I predict an all around worthless weekend!

A hands-on day, version: equine

Today in my Principles of Medicine class, the professor (who's an equine vet) mentioned that there was a horse with botulism down at the teaching hospital and invited students to come watch a neurological exam being done.

Botulism is caused by a bacteria, Clostridium botulinum, that creates a toxin that is released into an animal upon ingestion (and sometimes, though less frequently, through a wound). Most humans associate botulism with improper food canning technique and as an ingredient in Botox. Horses are particularly sensitive to the botulism toxin and exhibit neurological signs such as muscle weakness that leads to a stiff gait, difficult chewing/swallowing and sometimes muscle tremors. Since the severity of the clinical signs depends on how much toxin was ingested, some horses are worse than others. This poor guy was reaching the end stages where he was lying down most of the time and trying to get up every now and again.

It was a really timely case because the professor had lectured on neurological problems the last lecture and on toxemia today- both factors in botulism. I gladly skipped my boring clinical pathology lab to go watch the exam and hear what she had to say and I'm glad I did because I learned a lot and the experience really helped cement some of the concepts we had learned in lecture into my mind.

On our way out of the barn, a friend and I passed by the window into the large animal surgical suite. Lo and behold, they were removing a frontal sinus mass on a horse- awesome! So we stood and watched for at least an hour as they went in through the front of the skull (the "forehead" as we think of it") and dug out this mass, flushed the hole, put in a gauze drain and stapled the horse's face back together. I've seen a couple of field surgeries on horses- a sedative and pain killer are given but the horse remains standing and relatively "awake"- but never a fully anesthetized horse under surgery, so this was a great opportunity. There was a TON of blood but fortunately I'm not squeamish.

All in all, a pretty cool day on the equine front. Things like this help remind me why I'm in school slogging through the tedious material and I'm encouraged to seek out these opportunities in the future- even if it means missing a bit of clin path ;)

Forrays into Cooking

It's easy to let this blog become only about vet school because vet school consumes the majority of my days. (In all honesty, it could consume a heck of lot more if I let it. I'm more of a crammer so I'm not nearly so studious as my peers...oops.) I prefer to get home from class on weekdays and bum around on the internet, maybe do a productive thing or two and then read for pleasure before talking to my fiance and going to bed relatively early.

But I don't want a blog just about vet school. Because while sometimes enthralling, exhilirating, exciting, etc, vet school has the potential to be dry, boring and tedious. And writing about something that is the latter just makes reading a blog dry, boring and tedious. Which in turn begins to erode my diligence in writing in said blog and then I disappear from the blogosphere for over a year and feel guilty for being such a slack-ass. So what I'm trying to say is, I'm going to attempt to write posts about things other than just vet school. (And yes, I see the irony in taking up an entire post about not writing about vet school...by writing about vet school.) So onward we go to tonight's topic, which is cooking.

I love to cook. I love looking up new recipes, tinkering with old ones, having something turn out successfully and having people enjoy what I make. But if truth be told, I am not always on the winning side of success/deliciousness. Sometimes, I make things that make me really glad that I'm the only one that has to eat it and that no one else ever has to find out about it. Anyway, in a few weeks time I'm having people over for my birthday. It's going to be a bunch of Mexican-themed food because they have no Mexican food up here in this part of the Great White North and by the time I get home on school breaks, Taco Bell looks (and tastes) like fine Mexican cuisine. So I'm aiming for something similar to a pupusa- a center of meat, cheese and beans wrapped in some dough. Haven't yet decided if I should do more palm-sized lumps or put it all in a pie tin and slice it, but I think so long as it tastes good, people won't much care in what shape it took on their plate. If all goes well, I may even post a recipe! Which is a bit presumptuous, but is a hell of a lot better than an Instagram picture of food. But pet peeves are a blog post for another day ;)

Writing a blog post is a lot easier when you have something interesting or inspiring to write about. Seems obvious, but when the schedule of classes and labs becomes more routine (and more mundane), I think it'll be harder and harder to keep that promise to myself to continue blogging.

Today provided suitable interesting material, though! I mentioned that this semester's classes are edging closer to "real" vet med stuff. Well, today we had our first anesthesia lab of the semester. We rotated through stations covering patient restraint (including blood collection and injections sites, which were essentially review from last semester), patient work-up sheets (including drug dose calculations and patient "status" evaluation for anesthesia), fluid rate calculations for said patients, IV catheter placement and intubation. It was all fairly hands-on, which was engaging.

I'm fortunate that I gained a lot of experience before vet school. Some people will advise against worrying too much about the experience, that that's what school is there to teach you. And it's true, they teach you these things. But having a lot of experience has made my life a lot easier! I'd only ever had the chance to intubate a dog once in practice (and managed to intubate the esophagus instead of the trachea- oops) but I've placed a hundred IVs, given countless injections and restrained a crap load of patients. It's so nice to have that already in the back of my mind. The hardest part is trying not to look like a know-it-all in front of my classmates. I think I managed to help a few people out today, though, which made me feel better.

Overall an exciting day of "real world" stuff. I can't believe after this semester we're half-way there!

Back in the saddl.e

I really admire people that can write really compelling, humorous, come-back-for-more blogs. Actually, I just admire people that can keep up with their blogs on even a semi-regular basis. According to this, my last post was November of last year. I've failed miserably. Oops.

So much has happened since last November. There are two big things, though:

First (and most importantly, at least to the purposes of this blog's future), I'm still in vet school- half way through my second year. I made it this far- amazing! We're a week into our second semester already and the classes are becoming more real. Anesthesiology, medicine, surgery...it's terrifying. (No, that was not a typo of 'terrific'.)

Second, I got engaged over the summer. Which sounds so exciting and wonderful but is really just more things on my plate in the disguise of rainbows and unicorns and lace and flowers. Don't get me wrong, I'm so happy to be spending the rest of my life with this guy. But planning a wedding from another country while going to school full time in a rigorous program can be called insanely stressful during the best of times (and 'bat-shit crazy' under suboptimal conditions...) But I plug along merrily and only cry sometimes :)

Other than those things, life has been as normal as it can be when you live in Prince Edward Island for eight months out of the year and Maryland the other four. I'm hoping I can be more diligent with this blog and hopefully include more than just vet school stuff. Although that would mean you have to read wedding crap and even I, planning a wedding, don't much enjoy reading wedding crap. So we'll just have to see how this goes.

Here's to a good start to 2013 and hoping that my next post isn't next November!