A long break

Yes it has been a long long break since my previous post. All I’m going to say is, I’m still going well. I hope.

A new year, a new semester, which brings a new set of challenges. This is the year for extramural work attachments with vets out in practice. We have to do 12weeks of that within 1.5 years. Sounds simple, but it is quite depressing when you realise that’s about all of your holidays gone. But hey, no one’s complaining!

Ok maybe I feel like complaining, but most of it has got to do with costs and time involvement due to travelling there and back. And maybe sometimes about how boring things can get. No wonder there is such a high turnover rate in small animal vet clinics. This “GP” work is really not for everyone. The daily drones definitely do get to you in a while, and it has got me within 2 days. Not a good sign.

This is actually my 2nd block of 2w attachments. First block was done at an emergency centre. Definitely not the life for me. I’m not really a nocturnal sorta person, so working from 6pm to 6am for 3 days a week nearly killed me. And it was a bit boring there as well because the nurses were more… protective of their work? If you could call it that. Not that there weren’t nice nurses, but just… you find it hard to learn things even if you try to ask to help out. But at this new place, I am pleasantly surprised by how nice everyone is. The nurses are all really friendly, and try their best to include me in their animal-related chores. The vets are really nice too. There is the obligatory strict-ish vet who tests me on stuff (ddx for diarrhoea in dogs anyone?), the cute male vet who makes me feel welcomed by including me in conversations, and the motherly vet who helps to settle me in. Sadly the TCM vet isn’t in, I was really hoping to see acupuncture in action. Hopefully he will be back next week before I leave.

The experience I am gaining at this vet clinic will definitely go a long way. They seem really keen to let me insert catheters and take bloods, which I am thankful for. I also like the friendliness of the atmosphere, which is something I would want to encourage in my own practice if I do have one someday. And I want to chat with the locum vet there, just to gain an insight into what being a locum is like, having to change your habits from place to place. Well I still have 8 working days left to do that. Awesome. Can’t wait for that scheduled ex lap and hopefully some orthopaedic surgery to see the cute vet in action.

Farmwork!

Yay exams have ended! Can’t believe I survived through 3 weeks of torture like that. Now it’s time for the agonizing wait for results, which will be released in 2 weeks time. And by then we will know if we need to take supplementary exams, or that we’re safe for another semester. I really hope I don’t screw up big time, because I really don’t want to fail. Not after putting so much effort into that.

Let’s contine with the exam reviews. After my last post I had 4 papers left. The first of that was animal health, management and welfare. Always has been, and perhaps always cursed to be my worst subject. I know it’s supposed to be relevant to practice and stuff, but if i wanted to learn how to be a farmer I would go to agricultural school, not vet school. Herd health, dairy farm management, beef cattle management… Goodness. And as expected exams were once again weird, asking weird questions like “How many times has the consumption of chicken changed from the 1950s till now?” I don’t give a damn about that… So hopefully this year this subject might improve. Actually I think it will, after looking at what happened in pathology exam…

And yep up next was the pathology theory paper. Boy it was a tough little cookie. Long questions, insufficient time, lots of brain-wrecking and hair pulling. There were 3 sections, and each section was a little bomb that just slowly eroded away at my confidence for the paper. The essay questions were ridiculously long (30minutes to talk about what causes a liver to enlarge? Come on…), while the 5 minute questions were pretty decent, and the 1.5 minute questions were just like little knives that pierced through my heart as I go through each one. “List 4 examples of XX” How can I do that in 1.5 minutes? I already take 30s to panic and dig through my grey matter for any relevant information I picked up during studying. So yes, that paper was more like a confidence destroyer than a booster.

But if we thought that was bad, the patho practical exam was worse. Way worse. 1 hour to do 44 questions. Although the lecturer will only be taking the best 40, but that still won’t make much of a difference to most of us. Every single question was ambiguous, and every single answer option seemed plausible. Pictures after pictures, slides after slides, I could just feel the spirit in the room deflate into a pile of nothingness that was sobbing away in a corner. Even I felt the colour drain from my face as I contemplated the consequences if I failed this paper. It was that bad.

Immediately on the next day we had our parasitology exam as well, where we spend 2 hours looking at 28 stations of specimens and try to figure what they were, what their names are, and whatever relevant tiny details about them. Fleas, lice, ticks, mites, nematodes… with names like Spilopsyllus cuniculli (rabbit flea thingy) and Felicola subrostrata (cat biting lice), you needs lots of RAM in your brain to cram in foreign sounding words and strange details regarding those words. And having to relate a picture of a specimen to that foreign word. I hope I didn’t do too badly. Only time will tell.

And on Friday morning, the 26th June 2009, the king of pop Micheal Jackson passed away. And for the first time in a long time, I cried my eyes out. I woke up to many facebook updates claiming that MJ has passed away, but I refused to believe it until I checked the local news website and realised that this wasn’t a cruel prank, and that this was a cruel reality. I cried as I felt the loss of a legend, an inspiration, despite his mistakes over the years. Here was a boy, trapped in a man’s body, confused, angry, joyous, playful, and immensely talented. I fell in love with him and his music when I was a little girl in Mauritius. Every single time I went onto the car with my dad, I will request for his songs, and I would sing and dance along to the music, the beat, the tune, the voice. I had an old VCD of one of his music videos, and I remember feeling so sad when that was spoiled beyond repair. Until I was able to find another new copy to replace that one. It cannot be denied that his music has touched the world, and may he be immortalised through his songs, and how they have influenced everyone on the face of this earth.

I may not be your #1 fan, but I was definitely a fan, and will continue to be. I will never forget that windswept little girl who would dance to the tune of Billie Jean and how she fell in love with one of the greatest musicians of our age. Rest well MJ, you’ve had a tiring day.

And so on that note, I will end by saying… I will be away for farmwork at a pig farm for the next 2 weeks starting tomorrow (yes, despite the swine flu fears). Will be going with 2 friends. Hope everything will go well and we will enjoy ourselves! Will try to upload some photos of that onto this drearily plain blog. Until then, take care!

Ciao.

OPPS

Wow look at that. My promise to myself has once again failed. Perhaps I’m not born as a blogger. Haha not surprising though, my diary keeping days didn’t last long too. But hey I’m trying! In the middle of my exam period because it’s that mid exam break time.

So yes exams has started. Not on a good note though because after my first paper we had to walk home in the rain. Without an umbrella because we were all caught off-guard. Now I’m more than half way through the exams and I still have 4 papers on 3 subjects to go. Life isn’t easy is it?

So I’ve already finished Pharmacology, Anatomy, Microbiology and Virology, and today, Physiology. Let’s break it down and analyse each one.

Pharmacology was pretty decent. Except I almost did not plan my time properly. After doing 3 questions and taking around 1hr+ for that, I suddenly realise that I didn’t have 30min per  question, it was more like 20. So I had to hasten up. But in the end all was well, besides for a few careless mistakes I really should not have made. But alas I’m glad for my effort.

Next up in line was anatomy, both theory and practical. Theory paper was surprisingly manageable, and the section we expected to be the worst (neuroanatomy – my nemesis) was actually doable. It was reproductive anatomy that was harder. Come on, draw the venous drainage from the udder to the heart?!? No thanks. Once again I thought the paper was alright, just that I don’t think I will do as well as what I did last semester. Practical for us is sitting in a nice air conditioned (or naturally ventilated) computer room looking at slideshows. So no wet specimens. But it was still a tough call because there was no way to actually tell what picture we are looking at unless the question gives a clue. However most of the time it just goes, What is the structure marked A on the diagram? I don’t even know what organ this is how can I tell you what A is? There were a few tricky questions, but the straightforward ones should guarantee a pass. That’s all I’m thankful for.

Then it was microbiology. The subject that everyone dreaded. Why you ask? (Humour me won’t you) Well the subject coordinator proudly proclaimed at the beginning of the semester that the average mark for this subject last year was 52%. Bloody 52%. How did people even pass to get into second semester? Unless everyone did just well enough to pass, or else there should have been a lot of failures to bring the average down to 52%! And so of course everyone started panicking really bad for this exam. And for a good reason. Because it was actually quite tough. Things we thought were not important came out for the exams. Things we thought were important were nowhere to be seen. Things we skimmed through came out as a whole 10mark question on its own. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re trying to test us on how much we have learnt from your lectures, but it’s another when you’re trying to screw with our minds! That is not the way to set an exam paper. I could go on all day about this but I should really hold my tongue (my finger in this case).

And finally today it was Physiology. I do have to say it was an interesting paper because some questions were rather unexpected. Weird questions on small parts of the notes that we didn’t really focus on. And by the way the teaching for this subject sucked to the lowest level possible. So I think it was actually a miracle that we could study for it, considering the amount of sifting and extrapolations we had to make from basically junk. *pats on back* Well done to me and my fellow course mates. In terms of passing I should pass with no problem. But with regards to grades… Hmm that’s a grey area I’m unwilling to tread into.

Next up to wrap up the exams are Animal Welfare, Pathology and Parasitology. Big killer subjects. So back to more studying for me! Have a good one~

Ciao

Filler post!

Well first off happy happy Mother’s Day to all mothers in the world! Especially to mine hehe, for being such a staunch supporter of  me when no one believed in me when I said I wanted to be a vet. That meant bucket loads to me. Have a good one mom!

Sadly I am running out of time to write such posts. But it’s ok, because I can you entertained through the billions and gazillons of information I’m learning everyday. Well they keep me entertained. And today will be a nice little revision/interesting session, as we once again revisit our old friend, the cranial nerves. Yes I have finally gotten down to (trying to) learn them, all 12 of them. Or should I write that as XII of them. But ah well let’s cut the crap and get started.

CNI – Olfactory –> As its name suggests, it’s the sole nerve in the head that is responsible for your sense of smell. Lesions in this nerve will result in an impaired sense of smell (anosmnia).

CNII – Optic –> Once again, according to its name, this nerve helps with the sense of sigh by providing innervation to the eyes, specifically the retina. It is the sole nerve that provides visual imput, but it isn’t the sole nerve that gives us our sense of sight. Lesions in the optic nerve results in visual and pupillary light reflex (PLR, when you shine a light and your pupils contract) deficits.

CNIII – Oculomotor –> Not as easy to guess its function from its name, but we can still give it a try. Oculo – regarding the eye,  motor – movement. This nerve supplies most of the muscles that move the eye within the periorbita. This is also the nerve that sends parasympathetic innervation to your pupl muscles, and in the brain it contributes to your sense of sight. Lesions in this nerve causes deficits in PLR and strabismus, which is just a fancy word meaning flickering of the eyeball.

CNIV – Trochlear –> Tricky unless you are good with your anatomy of the eye. This nerve only innervates the dorsal oblique muscle which is responsible for pulling the eye in when stimulated. Hence you can guess what will happen if this nerve is damaged – yes that’s right, strabismus again, but this time the eye will only flick laterally.

CNV – Trigeminal –> Arguably one of the most important nerves that innervate the face, the trigeminal (named so because it has 3 major branches, mandibular, maxillary and ophthalmic branches) nerve provides sensory innervation to the whole face. It deserves another post all to itself, so that’s what we’ll leave it at today. Lesions in the trigeminal nerve leads to facial sensory deficits and masticatory muscle paralysis (dropped jaw)

CNVI – Abducens –> Another small nerve that has got to do with the eye again. From its name we can guess it will innervate a muscle that abducts something, and since I already gave the clue that it’s the eyes, we can all predict that this nerve innervates the lateral rectus muscle of the eye. See, it’s not that bad. Because the bad ones come later. Anyhow damage to this nerve results in (dun dun dun) strabismus again, and also failure to retract the globe.

CNVII – Facial –> Now this has to be the most important cranial nerve. It basically supplies motor innervation to most, if not all the muscles of facial expression, and the glands. Hence if this nerve is somehow damaged, there will be serious consequences, including paralysis of facial muscles (drooping of ear, lip and eyelid) and decreased glandular secretions (i.e. tears and saliva production). In addition the facial nerve also supplies taste sensing cells in the tongue (rostral 2/3), so without this wonderful nerve, I won’t be having much of an appetite.

CNVIII – Vestibulocochlear –> What a mouthful, until you realise the components of that word all deal with the ear. Hence we can conclude this nerve innervates the ear, both the balancing and the hearing bits. You might think deafness resulting from lesions in this nerve might not be too serious, but if innervation to your body’s balancing centre is offline, you bet there will be great difficulties in balancing, resulting in head tilting, body twisting and rolling, amongst other clinical signs)

CNIX – Glossopharyngeal –> This nerve innervates a range of target tissues, as can be seen from its name. Glosso – having to do with the tongue, and pharyngeal – to do with the pharynx. It also supplies the sensation of taste to the caudal 1/3 of the tongue. Together with cranial nerve X, they help to innervate movement to these 2 regions of the head. Lesions can be hard to tell, because CNIX and CNX do such similar things.

CNX – Vagal –> Easy one to guess, because we all know vagal = parasympathetic (I hope we all know?). It also sends a bit of innervation to the muscles of the tongue and the pharynx, and a bit of sensory too. If your animal is not responding to stimuli meant to set off a parasympathetic response in the viscera, and if it happens to have dysphagia (difficulty swallowing) and  respiratory noises (laryngeal paralysis), you can bet your money on this nerve being the point of lesion.

CNXI – Accessory –> This nerve doesn’t actually do much for the face. It supplies some of the major muscles in the neck, namely the brachiocephalic family and the trapezius muscle. Lesion in this nerve will cause these muscles to become paralysed and start to atrophy.

CNXII – Hypoglossal –> Ah the word glossal has popped up again, so this should be a clue to where it innervates. That’s right, the tongue! And this nerve innervates the extrinsic muscles to the tongue, and some intrinsic ones too. Examples include styloglossus, hyoglossus, genioglossus and geniohyoideus. With this information, we will know what to expect if this nerve is damaged, which is the paralysis and deviation of the tongue if its a unilateral lesion.

And voila! This is a short summary on the various functions of the cranial nerves. I haven’t even gotten into which of the 249857295748 foramens they come out from in the skull. But alas you may ask, how do we remember this 12 seemingly nonsensical words? That’s what mnemonics are for, and we have a pretty good one to help. But it’s a bit dirty, so I shall cross out the words that are slightly suggestive. You can fill in you own.

O O O To Touch And Feel V- Girls V- and H-

Hehe.

Ciao~

Woopsie daisy

Almost forgot about my little promise to myself. Well hopefully this post before midnight and the beginning of a new week will redeem me.

This week was… interesting, and a bit trying at times. You see, we had a dog over at our house for the week because his parents were going overseas for a week. Well he’s more so a puppy than a dog, being only 10 months old, but for a maltese X silky terrier, he’s already pretty grown. And a typical name for him as well: Cuddles.

I refused to take any pictures of him, because of some unknown genetic fault within me that just does not see eye to eye with lap dogs, but as I’m sitting here and typing this alone without Cuddles licking at my feet, I’m really hoping I won’t regret my decision. He was a typical white maltese looking dog with a streak of light tan fur running down his back (or dorsal midline if you want to be nerdy). Fur was slightly too long for my liking, and you will soon see why. He likes his little “Woof” ball and his tug of war rope, and he likes to sleep in corners. He also has disuse muscle atrophy in his left hind leg, most probably due to a joint problem rather than nerve problems, because I checked his reflexes and he was fine. He likes to pee indoors, but that’s most probably because our house isn’t carpeted like his, and we don’t take him out for enough walks. He is very licky, and will lick your fingers like you are the most delicious person/have the most delicious fingers around. When it comes to meal time, he can be your best dream or your worst nightmare, because he has no reaction whatsoever to the food. He looks at the food, looks at you, and walks away.

No doubt he caused a lot of trouble with the peeing and the pooing, but I forgive him because puppies have poorer bladder control anyway. Not to say he couldn’t be better house-trained, but it’s not fair to blame it all on the dog. That’s why I made it a point to walk him twice everyday, even if I have to wake up 2 hours before my classes just to do that. And it’s during these walks that I really want to snip off all the loose ends of his fur, because they trap all kinds of leaves. Even now I still have a few residual crinkled brown leaves in my room.

Ah pets… Once you have them you just feel weird without them. I’ve just started growing used to having Cuddles sleep at my foot/besides my bag/in front of my heater/by the corner near my door/next to my cupboard while I type away on the computer. Having a pet does instill a certain sense of responsibility in you, if you can understand the meaning of the word responsibility (read: having pets does not instill a sense of responsibility in kids because they don’t do most of the cleaning up after a pet anyway!). I can’t just go out and come home at whatever time I want, because I have to walk and feed Cuddles at night. And I can’t just ignore the little fellow, because that’s just being mean to an animal who craves my attention. I get worried when I don’t see him, because I don’t know what mischief he’s getting up to (but usually he’s just sleeping by the balcony).

Now that he’s gone, I hope he will enjoy his time back at home with his parents. And I hope his leg will be alright too. Be a good boy Cuddles!

Being a vet puts me at a unique and privileged position between pets and pet owners. I do hope that I can be that bridge between this 2 entities, helping to enrich and prolong a meaningful relationship. Good luck to all vets and vet students!

Ciao~

Friendly beloved old grandfatherly lecturers

The first week back from the holidays has been… more of a blind rush than anything. Weird how there can be so much to do after school has just started. But I guess that’s what school is like for us, a continuous train of information with occasional changes in speed of the rate of information upload. So no time for breaks!

I would have to say the highlight of this week was the anatomy practical on Thursday. We got to dissect a cow foetus to look at the structure of the spinal cord. This required very delicate, but yet very brutal work to break away the cartilaginous vertebrae to access the spinal cord within its dura. While my group mates were busy doing that, I was trying to hack away at a piece of donkey vertebrae. Only after my many attempts at trying to separete the 2 vertebrae did I come to appreciate just how tough the connection between the bones in the spines are. Makes you realise why killers would rather disarticulate the limbs of their victims than the whole body. Vertebral bones are hard things to get through. The sheer number of joints, which is at least 3 at last count, and the amount of fibrous connective tissues are enough of a deterrence to me.

In other news, we got to inoculate an egg with a flu virus during a microbiology pract on Thursday too. It was during this lecture that one of our lecturers, the friendly beloved old granfatherly one, told us the way he explained how eggs came about to his grandkids. Whenever he was asked where do eggs come from, this would be his reply:” There is a mommy and a daddy chicken, if they love each other a lot, they will do a special cuddle.” Isn’t that the cutest and most innocent way of talking about reproduction to your kids? Perhaps that’s what I will tell my kids before they are old enough to know the truth about it anyway. Thank you cw!

Nothing much is happening next week except for the ominous parasitology quiz on monday. Always a dread. Because we have to study the name, pathogenesis, life cycle, control methods, and identification procedures for hmmm I would say at least 30 arthropod parasites. The absolute number might not seem like a lot, but when you realise you have a lot of information to remember for each one of the 30-odd bugs, things start to feel slightly, just slightly overwhelming. And so I will continue to mug in the face of difficulty. Not before some good old distraction in the form of anime.

Ciao

My my my…

Tsk tsk. That was from me to myself. What happened to the dream of keeping track of my last 3 years in vet science? Tsk tsk. I should really force myself to be more disciplined. 1 post per week, more if anything significant happens. Sounds very reasonable to me.

Well I could use the start of my holidays as an excuse for my lack of blogging, but thinking back to what I’ve done for the past week or so, I have to say that that is a very bad excuse. More so that I’m lazy perhaps. Yup you heard right, I just had my 1 week easter holidays. 1 week… Can be long, can be short. For me… I think it was too short. Too short for me to fully relax myself and to catch up on school work. You have to choose one or the other. I made the mistake of choosing both, and here I am sitting in front of my computer on the 2nd last day of the holidays wondering what the hell did I do for the past 7 days. And the answer is, nothing.

I tried to meet up with friends, and do some exercises, but the thought of school work drags me down. I tried to do some work, but the desire to rest my jaded mind kept distracting me. So either way, I didn’t progress very far. But then again, perhaps that’s what holidays are about. It’s a break from the normal pace of school life. It’s an expansion of “me” time, and a contraction of “study” time. At the end of the day I might feel guilty of spending too much time studying/playing, but then again we can’t reclaim lost time. So I say we should just enjoy it. Which is what I’m doing now.

Well let’s talk about some plans for activities for the later part of this year. I have a 2 week placement at a pig farm 4hours outside of town in June/July, but it’s all good because I’m going with a friend who has a car. The only thing we need to settle would be accommodation, which I’m starting to look for now. Then after I come back from this, a few of us are planning to go off for another holiday at theme park wonderland. I hope that will still go through because I really want a proper holiday.

Damn I really think I have African Horse Sickness. Whenever I cough, and I do mean whenever, there will always be phlegm. No matter how hard I try to clear it all, my respiratory mucosa just keeps secreting more and more. It’s even going up to my nose now. I’m sorry if I’m grossing anyone out… But the good thing is, I am not in any respiratory distress at the moment. So all’s good. For now.

In approximately 5 more weeks it will be the dreaded exam period. And this semester is not an easy one to conquer, with 9 exam papers to go through. I don’t think I will do as well, because I haven’t been working as hard as I would like myself to be working. Not to say I’m disappointed with myself, but I know my potential and I know I am far from reaching that. Mind you I’m not being complacent too. I know when to buck up if need be. Perhaps that’s what being a vet is like… You’re relaxed most of the time because the cases are so routine, but once in a while when you see a case you know you don’t know, that’s when you react and try to solve it. From this I guess it becomes apparent why so many vets become tired of their jobs. Trying to work through 30 years of my-dog-has-a-skin-problem or my-cat-has-a-kidney-problem is pretty deary. No wonder the turn over rate is so high. But I’m no adventure seeker, so I hope I will and can persist in this career.

In case I haven’t revealed this, I am a total anime freak as well. Not the mainstream naruto/bleach/one piece fanboy/fangirls, though I do admit they have their good moments too. But I like the smaller, lesser known animes. Don’t worry this won’t become an anime blog any time soon, purely because I have no time to watch animes and write reviews about them in addition to juggling notes from 7 modules and trying to maintain an almost non-existent social life. However I do want to keep track of some of the animes I’ve watched throughout my time here. A recent one I just finished was called Mononoke. It tells of the various encounters of this medicine seller (Kusuri-uri) with monsters, and how he tries to appease them. I really enjoyed the drawing style of this anime, where almost everything was drawn in the style of the old Japanese art, with its intricate florals and brilliant colours. Very alternative. And the fantastic music was a surprising bonus too. If your like accordion music, do check out its soundtrack.

Another cheesy anime I finished recently too ( you’d think I have no time to study!) was one called To Aru Majutsu No Index, about this city of magic and science users (mages and espers respectively), and the interactions between these 2 factions. The protagonist just had to be this guy who had the skill of (guess what) neutralizing powers from both skills. And so we follow this bumbling hero around (bumbling because his powers caused him to sacrifice his luck) as he rescues pretty girls and saves the day. You can tell I wasn’t too amazed by this one. But if you need brainless action, this is the anime for you.

And with the ending of those 2 animes, I have begun to follow yet other animes. One is called K-On, which is a shoujo anime about a freshie high school girl who joins a band with 3 other girls. It will be a light-hearted watch I’m guessing. Another weird one I just started on is called Ristorante Paradiso, about (dearie me) a girl who becomes infatuated by a old (almost elderly) waiter at her mother’s restaurant. That’s just to satisfy my desire-for-older-men side thank you. And if I am able to understand it at all, this new anime called Shangri-La. It sounds like a complicated anime about carbon taxes. And lastly, Mainichi Kaa-san, or literally, Everyday Mother. Very funny, very light hearted. I’m hoping these anime will keep me sane in the coming months of major studying and panicking.

Ciao.

Update!

Wow has it been almost 3 weeks since I blogged? I hope this means I’m really busy and not because I couldn’t be bothered to.

Technically I was really busy with school. We just had the quiz of doom today – pathology quiz. And all the rumours about how difficult it was was true. It wasn’t a mind-blowing, totally in-your-face kind of tough, but it was just the amount of content you had to be comfortable with, and how confident you are with your diagnosis of the pathogenesis. And that is a skill you pick up with time. I think that was why we found it really difficult, because it is the first time that we have to judge something based on our own knowledge, and simple regurgitation will not get you through at all. That was a very sobering thought for me. It is also a clear signal that we are indeed moving on from simple knowledge-based learning to application based learning. This opens up an exciting door though, and exposes us to a totally different side of the vet industry.

And it does not hurt that our pathology lecturer looks like patrick swayze. He is one of the best looking ageing man I have seen in a long long time. Would I dare to say even better than Richard Gere? Nah I won’t dare to offend his fans out there, but this patho lecturer is a very smart and polished-looking guy. He is really patient with us when answering our range of relevant and irrelevant questions. Well considering the fact that he had 9 kids, I would suppose he has had enough practice with his children to know how to handle a bunch of immature and noobish vet students. Both him and his wife are super over-achieving vet pathologists, being the head of this department and CEOs of others. Can you imagine dinner table topics?

“Honey I just saw this case today of a horse with chronic severe multifocal pyogranulomatous inflammation of the liver and the owners were asking if it would be worth it to try to save the horse? Oh and could you pass me the salt? Thanks dear. Ryan and Allison, stop jumping on the seat and eat your dinner properly. Harrison, don’t interrupt when mommy’s talking to daddy. Yes dear you were saying about my case?”

Oh my gosh.

But yea, nice lecturer does not equate to a good quiz. Sometimes the nicest people can turn their backs around and give you the nastiest bites. And it’s even sadder if that person was really close to you, and one day that distance between you just expands exponantially until it is impossible to close the gap ever again? Opps I’m sorry, that’s a story for another day. For now, I just want to reward myself for my hard work (and even that did not guarantee a good mark I’m afraid) with a nice long sleep. Take care all!

Of the birds and the Ps…

Wow… 25 views on 1 random day. Haha that’s pretty amusing for me. Thanks to any passing-by supporters I might have!

Well it has been some time since I last updated. Not that school work was so overbearing I forgot about blogging, but rather because life has been so mind-numbingly boring that I’ve forgotten I could have blogged to keep myself entertained. But alas, I’m back.

Nothing much happened since the last time I blogged. Unless you count cutting open horse and pig penises interesting. Technically it is actually quite intriguing, because the arrangement of the cavernous (erectile) tissue is actually what it looks like in the text – for once. It was fun looking at the accessory glands of the male reproductive tract, because I could actually find them on the horse, while everyone in my dissection group were convinced that they were either 1) cut away, or 2) lost under the masses of red blood-stained fascia and muscles. Oh in case you were wondering, no we don’t get a whole horse for that, we get given wet sludgy dodgy-looking slabs of tissue that we have to work with to figure out where everything is.

We also looked at the pig’s penis. It has a cute little corkscrew at the end that helps it to penetrate into the vagina through a rotating “screwing” action. Hey maybe that’s where the term “screw with someone” came from. Who knows. I don’t want to know. Hmm after the male reproductive tract dissection, we’re doing the female reproductive tract dissection tomorrow, which should be fun too.

Lectures have been ok so far. We have JG, who is this really funny lecturer taking us for microbiology, which is always good because microbiology tends to be a subject that works pretty well at putting people to sleep. And it is the toughest topic me thinks. Apparently the average score for last year was only a 52%, which is surprisingly low. Another statistic to put the pressure on everyone. But I think it’s a pretty interesting topic, and hopefully that interest I have will carry me through this module for this year.

Another new lecturer we got was a Scottish dude taking us for pharmacology. Which is another good thing because although pharmacology is an important topic, its dryness destroys any shred of interest normal people might have in it. In only the most nerdified individuals do this flame of passion still burn, albeit slightly less brightly. The fact that the course moderater is not a lecturer I personally like, that’s another minus. But hey, here comes a cool dude called GM to shake up our feathers! From what I can see (and hear), all the girls in the lecture hall were especially… frisky during his lecture. Havin that Scottish accent reAHlly puts the fARn back in phARmacOHlogy. Ok there was no fun in pharmacology anyway, but I was trying to make a point here. But the truth is, he is a good lecturer with a funky accent, and that always aids in increasing our attention span for lectures. See, an easy combination for a successful lecture.

Ahh well that’s about it for tonight… I feel like a good sleep. Not that I haven’t been getting any, but I just like my sleep. Need to get as much of it as I can while I’m in school. Shall end with a cute picture!

A Maltese puppy getting eaten by leaves

(Almost) the end of the first week of school

Time flies so fast when you don’t think about it. It’s already the 4th day of school. Lessons has been manageable so far, but we’re already getting a taste of what we will be getting for the rest of the semester. Yesterday was supposed to be our first full day of school, but practical ended 1hr early, so it’s all good. This friday will be the 2nd full day of the week. At least for me, because I’m in group B.

It’s kind of weird that suddenly I’m the one separated from everyone I know. All my chummies are in Group A while I’ve been cruelly put into group B. We always fantasized about our whole gang doing a dissection practical togather, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen just yet. Do I mind? Hmm I think I’m ok with the whole idea, since it will be a good chance to separate me out from people and things I’m familiar with. Trains my already developed sense of independence I suppose.

Living with a housemate is pretty good. It feels strange that all of a sudden there is someone you can depend on at home. Someone to do the dishes when you’re studying. Someone to make the house warm on a cold day. But I’ve gotten used to living by myself, so I’ll need a bit more time to get used to this new concept of “depending on someone else”. It’s a mutual relationship afterall.

I still can’t believe that lt is taking pharmacology. That really means more workload this semester, trying to deal with our toughest subject yet (I think), with our worst lecturer (I thinks too). Well time to finish off this week with style. Almost time for my histology pract, so I will see you in a while!