Left my heart...

Lately I feel more and more like a child of two worlds.

The weather is getting cooler here in Illinois. Fall is almost here and I'm loving it. I grew up in the midwest, and autumn is absolutely my favorite season. I can't describe the perfection of a beautiful fall day to someone who grew up somewhere without a true autumn season. The sun is warm, but the breeze is crisp and cold and makes your cheeks pink. The sunlight filtering through leaves so brightly jewel-colored red, orange and yellow makes you feel like you're standing in a kaleidoscope. The air smells like woodsmoke and baking spices. It's been my own personal Nirvana since I was a kid.

Then I moved to St. Kitts. At first I hated the heat and humidity, but soon I grew accustomed to it. I fell in love with the coqui frogs at night, and the serenity I felt floating face down watching brightly colored fish darting around me. Now when someone still at Ross posts a photo of themselves on the beach, I feel a pang of longing to be there. I miss the ocean and eating barbecue chicken with my feet buried in the sand. I miss my friends. The island got under my skin in a big, bad way and I miss it so, so much at times.

Apologies.

I know I've been really lax in updating lately. It's a combination of being busy and tired and just not having too terribly much to say.

I finished my diagnostic medicine rotation last week. Necropsy was rough. Large animals like horses and cows are a serious work out to necropsy. I was so sore I could barely move some days. I went home with dried blood still on my elbows a couple of times. I'm not a fan, basically. It can be cool to see lesions and find the cause of death, but overall, it's a lot of bloody, nasty, hard work. But I got a good evaluation from the faculty, so that's nice.

I just finished my first week of my lab animal rotation this past Friday. So far it's been pretty slow. There were three first year students rotating through before they began classes last week. I mean, before they've had a single day of vet school yet they're on these rotations with fourth year students. It's kind of cool, I guess, for them, but I don't see that they get much out of it. The students on my rotation didn't seem all that enthusiastic. And it certainly bogs down the fourth years' experience. I don't really get it.

One really cool thing we did get to do on Thursday was head up to Chicago to get some experience with non-human primates used in animal research. I won't say much about that, because animal rights groups tend to go insane at the mention of research monkeys. I can assure you that all of the ones I saw were socially-housed, got lots of enrichment through music, toys, food, etc. and were in good health. Getting to pet monkeys for a day was pretty awesome.

It's finally getting cool here. Down in the 70s today. It was lovely. It's cool enough to sleep with my A/C off and the windows cracked tonight. I'm looking forward to my apartment smelling like the outdoors again.

I've been dieting, trying to lose some weight before graduation. I'm down six pounds so far!

Boo do doobie doo.

Not much to say. The Ross summer semester officially ended on Thursday, so I have officially completed one semester of clinics (OHMYGODholycrap!).

I'm on Diagnostic Medicine right now, which actually takes up two blocks for a total of four weeks. I'm spending the first two weeks on cytology, and the last two weeks on necropsy. I really enjoy pathology, it's another aspect of medicine that feels like a treasure hunt to find the answer. Unfortunately, I'm not as good at it as I feel I am with imaging. My eyes don't pick up things as easily when they're microscopic on a slide, or surrounded by a puddle of gelatinous blood on a necrotic piece of tissue. But so far my skills in ctyology seem comparable/slightly above those on rotation with me, so I don't feel too bad.

I do remember being much, much better at recognizing cells in 3rd semester during my Clinical Pathology class, though. However, we were looking at slides several times a day every week, so that likely has something to do with it. And I have gotten better over the course of the week. Yesterday I successfully diagnosed 11 out of the 21 cases we looked at, and of the 10 I missed I had recognized elements that were right but I didn't arrive at the correct conclusion (i.e. saw a pyogranulomatous inflammation, didn't find the fungal agent responsible).

Anywho... Not much going on. Castiel is getting bigger. He's been neutered, and he's flipping crazy. I miss my calm, sleepy kitten when he first came to me (anemic and with gastritis, yeah, I know). But hopefully he'll grow out of this uncontrollable phase of climbing curtains and destroying anything remotely resembling plastic.

Okay, not as cute as a cat, but still. I like giant millipedes.

I bought brand new brushes a few months ago, and hadn't had the opportunity to try out the eyeliner brush yet. I love it! Using the brush and gel eyeliner makes drawing vintage cateyes a la Audry Hepburn super simple!

Winner!

I actually really like reading radiographs most of the time. Sometimes it's tricky and frustrating, but most of the time it feels like a treasure hunt for me that ends in an animal going home less sick than it came in. And I'm kind of good at it, too.

Back in 5th semester (I'm ashamed to admit this) I really slacked off on my DI - that's Diagnostic Imaging - midterm. There was a Pharmacology midterm right before it, and we were leaving for Puerto Rico a day after it. So, yeah, I wasn't my most focused. I didn't study hardly at all. Of 20 powerpoints on the exam, I had reviewed 11 the night before the test. I woke up at 4am the morning of the exam and rushed through the remaining 9 just hours before the exam. I was so afraid I was going to fail the midterm and have to catch up on the final exam. I walked away from that midterm with a 95%! Something about radiology just clicks in my head. Maybe I'm a visual thinker, I don't know.

So I was pretty confident going into my Imaging rotation. What I wasn't expecting was to find out that the Univeristy of Illinois students hadn't ever had a class on imaging. They had gotten it in bits and pieces spread out throughout their various coursework, but never a class devoted to imaging.

Suffice to say, I'm doing well on this rotation, and we'll leave it at that.

Today I had a pretty awesome little moment of victory. We are assigned three cases: bone, thorax, and abdomen. We are asked to study the case based only on a brief signalment and history (Ex: 9-year-old, male rottweiler, vomiting for two days), and interpret what we see on radiographs, and present the case along with our differentials to the class.

My thorax case threw me because some of the findings were contradictory. On lateral view, there was a HUGE soft tissue opacity centered around the base of the heart and dorsally elevating the trachea. The mass was more visible in right lateral than left lateral, indicating it was in the left lung. But on ventrodorsal view, it wasn't there. My first thought was a mediastinal mass, probably the tracheobronchial lymph nodes given its location, that would explain those findings. But then, the mediastinum was deviated to the left. Masses in the chest deviate structures away from them, not toward them. It made me start second guessing my diagnosis. I considered atelectasis, but couldn't explain why I couldn't see a retracted lung lobe on VD or why I could still see blood vessels in the lung extending out to the periphery of the thorax if there was a collapsed lung lobe. I ended up sticking with my diagnosis of a mediastinal lung mass.

The clinician specifically said that it was a challenging and confusing case. He said that the deviation of the mediastinum was odd and made you second guess yourself. Basically, I was given a deliberately difficult assignment and knocked it out of the park!

The little things.

One thing I am very grateful for inheriting from my mother is her positivity. My mom is just a naturally happy person. There are people in this world who I just don't understand how they function being as angry and miserable as they constantly seem to be. People who say, "Ugh, I hate ____" every other sentence just confuse me and make me sad. That isn't a statement against clinically depressed people. I've been there twice in my life, and I know it's different than just being a moody jerk. Plus most of the clinically depressed people I know, you would never guess it talking to them. I'm talking about people who are just negative all the time and unpleasant to be around.

The great thing about being a positive person is you can be having the crappiest day ever, and it only takes something small to bring your spirits right back up again. A nice day, a good cup of tea, and suddenly all of the stress and negativity is gone. And I truly do love that I'm one of those people, because it makes life easier.

Today I had a really hard time getting out of bed. I've spent the last six days in and out of our small animal isolation ward caring for a very sick dog with Parvo. I was exhausted and sore and did not want to get up to go do 7am treatments. I went, and left school around 9am and decided to stop at the Market at the Square, Urbana's farmer's market, on my way home. The sun was warm, the breeze was cool, the sky was blue with big fluffy white clouds, and the air smelled like summer in the Midwest. After a few minutes of walking through isle after isle of fresh produce and baked goods, I was in my happy place. I bought apple butter, cheese, sweet corn, and shortbread cookies. Now I'm in bed, cuddling with Castiel, sipping a cup of mint tea, and completely and utterly content.

Here's some pics from the market. It's truly one of the biggest and best farmer's markets I've ever been to.

I love it when there's a vendor that does this! They basically take every fresh lettuce and herb in their garden and combine it to make a salad mix. It's seasonal, so it's always changing, and delicious. I love to have it  with goat cheese fritters, dried cranberries and sunflower seeds.

A shuck your own corn truck! My favorite of all the vendors there.

Money woes.

Sorry for the big gaps between posts. The wildlife and exotic rotation was crazy busy. I got to do a lot of really cool stuff, though, including two zoo visits where I anesthetized and did physical exams on zoo animals. There was also a big wildlife component, so I got to restrain owls, snip off some necrotic bone and sew up a goose's leg, and put a nasogastric tube in a box turtle.

Right now I'm on small animal critical care. There are three students on the rotation right now (three Rossies of different generations - HOLLA!) and so it's actually pretty laid back and we have a lot of time to round on cases, or common clinical presentations, topics like fluids or specific diseases... It's nice.

One thing I will say about the first clinical semester is that you blow through money fast. Between a deposit on your apartment, furnishing a new apartment from nothing (sofa, bed, dishes, silverware, cleaning supplies, etc.), my parking pass for Illinois was $660, the NAVLE was $570 for the national exam fee plus another $225 for state licensure, $230 for VetPrep NAVLE study materials, etc. almost every Rossie I know that just started clinics this semester is almost broke. Some of them have to live on less than $1,000 for the next month and a half, including rent. It's insane that in clinics we actually get about $2,000 less on our refund check than we did in semesters 1-7.

The good with the bad.

I had a hard day on Tuesday. I took over a patient staying in the ICU from another student when I started on the wildlife and exotic rotation. She was an intestinal resection and anastomosis post-op that wasn't doing well. She wasn't passing feces and had hard masses of impacted fecal material in her bowels that weren't moving. On Tuesday her owners came to visit and she passed away in the room with them. It wasn't a very pleasant situation, her owners were very upset, and I took the brunt of it.

Later that day I was drained and moody and just wanted to go home. My last appointment was a snake with a persistent respiratory infection that we'd been trying to treat for over two months. Even with a culture and sensitivity, the antibiotics weren't clearing it up. We resorted to an antibiotic that can have some serious side effects, but would get some of the nastier bugs that won't show up on culture and the antibiotics we'd tried previously did not cover. The owner was understandably upset and reluctant, and for some reason was having a personality conflict with the clinician. Things got heated and he refused the treatment. I asked the clinician if I could go try and talk to him, because I felt like we'd developed a rapport earlier and maybe I could get him to come around. We felt this was kind of our last shot at getting this snake better, so she told me I could try. I went up front and sat with him and told him I was sorry that things got so heated. I explained again why we wanted to proceed with this treatment, despite its risks. I told him it was ultimately up to him, and I'd understand if he still didn't want to, but that I didn't want him to walk out angry and to not at least try the treatment because of a personality conflict and tempers getting out of control.

Well, he agreed to the treatment. He also told me that he's working on a Master's in counseling, and that I am very good at conflict resolution and empathizing with people. It kind of made my whole day.