Yesterday was an "I hate everything" kind of day. Our group was having so much trouble getting blood from our cat (in for elective castration tomorrow) - we're all experienced so it wasn't a case of just not quite having a grasp on the technique - and that sent me into a spiral of frustration and grumpiness. It wasn't reasonable and I knew I should let it go, but I let it linger and it made me cranky.

Today was so much better. The only bummer was that I had to give up my extra sleep-in hour that we get while fourth years present for clinical conference to meet my group and a medicine technician to get blood from our cat. The medicine tech was able to get blood first try and I felt so much better with that off of our collective plate. We submitted it to diagnostics and went up to class. The rest of the morning was fine. After lunch, we had medical exercises lab in large animal. We began by practicing our wound cleaning and suturing on equine cadaver legs. It was so much easier to work with than the foam tubes they gave us in our principles of surgery class! My vertical mattress pattern turned out alright but my simple interrupteds were awesome! I wanted to finish closing the "wound" but we ran out of time. We went over to the teaching hospital barn for case presentations.

When I was younger, "public speaking" made me so nervous. But there came a point in my life where I realized it's better to not be nervous (fake it til you make it applies quite well, I find) and I just...stopped being nervous. So I volunteered to present the case today - a Standardbred racing gelding with laryngeal hemiplasia. Like the horse that came in with botulism last year, this case was great timing as we've been talking about equine respiratory stuff for the past week or two. As the condition itself is pretty straight forward (one side of the airway is obstructed by tissue that doesn't lift out of the way like it's supposed to), it was a really nice, uncomplicated case to present. I was actually kind of sad that I don't have to present anymore for the class because going through the motions gave me one of those validating tingles. And that more than makes up for yesterday's frustrations.

Speaking of faking it til you make it, tomorrow is our first live surgery - feline castrations! They're a very simple procedure and I don't expect it to be anything exciting (I hope it isn't exciting...) but I'm going to go do some more preparation before early bed time. Cross your fingers for me!