In Vet School, We Watch Grass Grow

Our agronomy professor lost favour with me.

He sprung a little field trip on us. The day before two major anatomy exams. He had no interest in rescheduling, was kind of a dick about it actually. He insisted it would be mandatory and that there would be a roll (there wasn't). I suppose it might have been alright if it was a really good trip, but this is what happened:

We got on some grungy old buses, drove out to a little farm, and then stared at grass for four hours. Four. The professor waffled on about the pasture, and got the farmer to waffle on about farming, and we literally walked to a paddock or two and looked at the grass, while they talked about grass. The farmer's dog got the most attention out of all of them.

The professor's credibility got seriously undermined within the first twenty minutes by this gem of an exchange...

Prof: What do the vets do?
Farmer: They are involved with animal health, preventive care, calving problems.
Prof: What about the pasture? Do they help with pasture management?
Farmer: No, I have a farm consultant for that.

Professors: In-credible

One of our anatomy professors is a little suspicious. Fortunately he only gives one or two lectures a semester, and mostly he's just there to confuse people in lab. At first he made me scratch my head, but now he's lost most of his credibility.

The first hint that he is actually clueless was first year. We were learning the nerves of the hind limb, and there was an unlabeled prosection showing them very nicely. One of the nerves was wonky, nothing we'd learned about at the time, so we asked this guy what it was. He said it was the ischiatic nerve. It was actually the pudendal nerve. Now, if you don't know what those are, the ischiatic nerve goes down your leg. The pudendal nerve goes over the back of the pelvis. If you think about the way a dog is set up, that's like a ninety degree angle between the two, and they're not even close to each other. There's pretty much no way anyone could get them confused.

Since then, he has said a lot of things that made us wonder if he knows what he's talking about, but nothing really stood out to me until a few anatomy labs ago. This was one where we had live horses in stalls and were palpating muscles and ligaments in their front legs. There were four people to a horse, two to each leg.

The pair across from me and my partner comes over asking if we found the styloid processes. If you feel the two bumps on your wrist (especially the one on the outside that you can see and kind of defines the wrist), those are the ends of the radius and ulna, known as the styloid processes. Other mammals have the same thing. So I said yes, we had felt them, and the other pair says that this professor had told them they're not palpable. He'd told them that what they were, in fact, feeling was the epicondyles. Er... there are no epicondyles of the radius and ulna. They don't exist, they're not there. Epicondyles are the name for the bony protuberances in other bones, like humerus and femur. And seriously. You can feel your wrists. Horses are build the same way. The styloid processes are undeniably, obviously palpable.

However the best thing that happened was this. This isn't so much him getting anatomy blatantly wrong, as just  going to show how little help he is.

On the upper forelimb, it's kind of hard to tell the muscles apart. There's a lot of them and they're somewhat confusing, so we got the nearest professor to come over and help us. Three guesses who.

So my partner asks him to clarify the muscles, and I bend down to show him which ones we think we can identify. Our horse is finicky about being touched in that area and also tired of being palpated for three hours, so she turns around and tries to bite me. All she managed to do was tap me with her nose since I was in a reasonably safe position. Since I wasn't facing her head and so didn't see that she was actually trying to bite me, my partner tells me to watch out.

Professor's answer to our question: "Watch your back first. ;)"

Then he leaves.

My partner looks at me. "I'm pretty sure I asked him the question," she says after a time.

Had to get another professor to explain the muscles to us.

Avian Anatomy

Our last anatomy lab was on avian anatomy, so we dissected chickens. Here is an account of some of the things I thought were interesting.

You'd be surprised how few feathers they actually have. When they're alive they're all poofy, but for dissecting they had us dip them in soapy water so that feathers wouldn't be floating everywhere all lab (I'm serious), and you can really see that there's not as many as you'd think.

Birds have a super massive keel on their bellies, part of their sternum. Imagine your sternum down your chest, but with a big fin. Most of  their bones are the same as mammals, but lots of things are fused. Most of their vertebral column is fused, which gives them stability and allows them to have less back muscles, which makes them lighter. The wishbone is their clavicle. Another interesting bony structure is the bone in their tongue--they don't have tongue muscles; the movement is conducted through their tongue bone.

Birds have a different voice organ than mammals, called the syrinx (we use our larynx). Something interesting I read is that songbirds and such that make a lot of complex sounds don't necessarily have a more developed syrinx or associated muscles.

Their brains are tiny, which I'm sure you already knew. What you might have not known is that their eyes are huge, way bigger than they appear because they aren't a sphere. Each eye is about the same size as the brain. Also their skull is kind of thick too, so if you're just looking at a bird and try to picture the size of their brain in their head, it's actually way, way smaller than you'd think just by doing that. They can have pretty super vision, but I don't think their brains do a whole lot else for them.

Birds don't have a diaphragm: they depend on moving their body wall to draw air into their lungs. So if you hold a bird so it can't move it's chest, it won't be able to breathe. They also have a pretty cool system, where air gets drawn into these air sacs and  then into the lungs and then into other air sacs before being exhaled, so that the air going into the lungs is always fresh. Being so efficient is why they can fly very high, where the oxygen is low.

Their gastrointestinal, urinary, and reproductive tracts all open into this one pouch and exit the bird through the same hole. They sort of have two stomachs--one that's glandular, and one that's super muscular (the gizzard). That's kind of neat because it actually utilises ingested stones to help grind up food. Their testicles don't descend (they stay inside the abdomen), and sometimes the only way to sex a bird might be using internal imaging. They also don't have a bladder.

If you look at the ovary, you can see a bunch of big red follicles, like the ones that will be tomorrow's egg and the next day's. They're super huge! And if you break one by accident, you get yolk everywhere. In our bird, it had actually had a ruptured part of its reproductive tract, so there was an egg that hadn't got its shell yet, and it was just hanging out inside the bird. It looked just like it would have if you'd cracked one and dropped it in.

The nerve that innervates their hind limbs passes over the kidney, so if they have kidney disease or a tumour or something, it can actually present as lameness.

Perching is a passive thing. When they bend their knees, it tenses the tendons that flex their digits, causing them to grip. It takes no energy for them to sit there gripping a branch, and if you want to un-perch them you have to straighten their legs.

Some birds, such as owls, have asymmetric ears so they can localise sound better. Also, birds have magnetite in their beak and neck muscles, which is an iron rich crystal that responds to the Earth's magnetic field. This gives them both directional and geographical location information.

Those are all the cool facts about birds I can think of for now, I hope you learned something.

You Have Been Warned

Last semester marked the end of general anatomy, though we still have comparative anatomy this semester. Having done the musculoskeletal system and thorax in first year, that left the head and abdomen. The division of learning was interesting: out of ten labs, seven were on the head, and three were on everything else.

I'm not sure who thought that was the best idea. If you ask me, they could probably have just made some sort of neuroanatomy/neurophysiology course to take the place of one of our useless ones (because sadly we have several that are a complete waste of time). It would seem to me that the abdomen is pretty important--think about how much a vet has to work with it, between the stomach and intestines, kidneys and bladder, and urogenital system. I'd imagine we're going to see a lot of spays/neuters, dogs swallowing things they shouldn't, horses with colic (abdominal pain), cats with urinary tract diseases, and everything else you can think of. Yet for some reason our learning of the anatomy of those things was all in one lab.

The last lab was so huge, in fact, that there was a giant warning page at the beginning of the preparation section and the dissection instructions. It very disapprovingly states that if you've gotten into the habit of not finishing, or even starting, the preparation sections, you had better get your act together because this module 10 is intense. It makes a point of reminding everyone that if you don't complete the preparation section and you get caught, you'll fail the lab.

Note: Writing this now since starting comparative anatomy, and looking at last semester's lab book, it saddens me to notice that lab 10 in it's massive enormity of reading, questions, and dissection, is still smaller than the work required for comparative anatomy. The first lab was 30 pages. The second lab was 40.

Slave Auction

As part of the fundraising for their halfway day--the day that is exactly half way through their degree, and they go off skydiving and partying and stuff like that--every year the third years hold a slave auction. At this event, groups of third year vets perform talent acts and then you can bid on them. If you win a group of slaves, you get them for two hours worth of work. The advertisements suggested having them clean your flat or be your best friend at a party and make you look cool. It is traditional for the other years to chip in and buy a set of slaves.

The average price for slaves was about $200, and they ranged between $100-$300. Everyone in our class gave the class rep $2, so with 100 people in our class that was just enough to buy one set of slaves. Our plan was to have them clean up after the First Year-Second Year party (that didn't actually happen so I'm not sure what we'll use them for). We kept getting outbid, and just barely managed to snag the last group for sale.

Most of the groups just did dances. One of them poked fun at our professors with rewritten lyrics. My favorite group was one that dressed in black morph suits, turned out the lights, and had glowsticks taped to their bodies in a stick figure shape. My second favorite was a bunch of people dressed up like cookie monster. I particularly liked this one because they had a huge amount of homemade cookies that they kept throwing into the audience. I got one.

One of the groups that didn't do a dance had this idea to sweeten the deal. You see, if you bid on them, you also got to take home your very own prosthetic leg. One of the bidders was a guy with crutches.

Another set of slaves was in the form of a barbershop quartet.

And, because it wouldn't be a vet event without random nudity, the audience somehow coerced the MC into taking his clothes off. I think that happened because the last set of slaves, a group of four guys, had already gotten some clothes off: when the bidding petered out, they kept offering to remove something if someone made a higher bid. Yeah, those were the ones we won.

Professors: Three Stances

Mr. Yorkshire accent who teaches nutrition is a cute old guy with messy white hair who not only uses the overhead projector, he doesn't know how to turn the computer projector off (so the computer's log-in screen isn't in the way) and has to have a student do it for him. He also calls the overhead transparents "acetates." I thought that was an acid with two carbons, but ok.

He has three, and only three, stances that he assumes during lecture.

Stance 1: This professor's most common state is with his hands level at his face. I think this is to emphasize his point. All his points, really. He looks into the middle distance, hands up to the sky, palms towards him, as if he's pleading with heaven, for pretty much most of the lecture.

Stance 2: This is interesting because his posture when he uses a pointer to point at the overhead is exactly the same every single time. He always turns to face the screen, puts his left hand on his hip, has the laser pointer in his right arm, and bends his right elbow keeping it level with his hip. He assumes this stance whenever he points to tables and graphs on his "acetates."

Stance 3: Whenever he needs to list something, such as benefits of a certain thing, his hands do drop below face level to a more normal position. He holds out fingers with his left hand and taps them with his right, just like anyone would do when counting out a list. Strangely, no matter how many points there are, he seems to get stuck on the third finger. If there are four points, he will just tap his third finger twice. It is important to note that these are fairly large, exaggerated list-counting-tapping movements.

A common cycle seen in his lectures is to begin with Stance 1 describing a topic, and switching to Stance 2 to point at a table that has data concerning this topic, then move to Stance 3 to list out key points. He will then return to Stance 1 to bring his point home, and the cycle restarts.

It's Good Not Being First Year

Today the first years had their initiation.

Last week, there was actually a "fake" initiation, where the third years did storm the classroom, shouting and blowing whistles and getting everyone to take their shoes off, rattling their cages but nothing happening after that. I heard it went poorly.

Having been warned by our third year friends, we all gathered near the vet tower and grabbed as many water balloons, eggs, bags of flour, and cartons of milk as we could. In front of the vet tower is the bridge that crosses the vet pond, and there was a tarp tunnel filled with what appeared to be mud, but one whiff of it revealed it was actually cow poo. A bit more potent than horse poo, which is what we got thrown at our class. A number of third years were putting water balloons in the vet pond. Three of them had a big slingshot, one of them holding each end, and the other practicing launching water balloons. He hit the third years that were setting up the poop tunnel.

Waiting and snickering, our first indication of the incoming victims was several third years running from the direction of the lecture hall. You could tell they had just stormed the first years, taken their shoes, and sent them out back. Shortly after this, screeches and screams and whistles and shouts could be heard from the route between the lecture hall and the vet tower. This is them running through the gauntlet of third years armed with their assortment of projectiles, no doubt.

Then they appeared! In ones and twos they struggled through the poop tunnel, emerging to clouds of flour and fish oil and milk, and most importantly, me and my friends armed with water balloons. I was actually on this awesome streak and hit like 4-5 of them out of the 10 or so that I threw (which is pretty good considering they were running and ducking).

Then the poor sods got ushered out to the concourse, where there was loud music and they were forced to dance this ridiculous dance everyone learns at VLE (the professor that instigated this apparently makes people do it at the beginning of all her lectures, too). Standing around dancing made them way better targets than when they were running and ducking.

After that they got the lovely news that their shoes were locked away and the key was in a balloon in the vet pond.

First Year Second Year Party

There's a traditional party thrown by the second year vets for the new first years every winter. At this point the first years only just escaped their Veterinary Leadership Experience, made it to the Mentor Mentee party the same night, and are very soon to be facing Initiation, but I guess that's just not enough. (As a side note several of us second years went to the Mentor Mentee party and thoroughly confused the first years, since it's supposed to be first and third).

The first year-second year party is fun when you're a second year. I'm uh... glad I didn't go to it when I was first year. It started off as a Rubik's Cube party, where everyone wore bright colors and traded with people to end up all with one color by the end of the night. The truth is, if you're a first year, things aren't really going to go in your favour at this party. Apparently for the one last year, the night got off to a great start when the entrance requirement was chugging an entire beer. Then, through the rest of the night, there were drench guns and syringes full of vodka and god knows what else, and at some point mud entered into the picture. I'm pretty sure every first year that went got tackled or hurled into the mud, chucked mud, and generally splattered with mud. Mind that it's winter. I'm not sure what else happened really, but I'm just glad I wasn't there.

We were a lot nicer to the incoming class than that. It didn't help that no one had drench guns (the things you use to give oral medication to farm animals), but there were still syringes, and the first years weren't getting in without a mouthful. There was only a very teeny tiny bit of mud, and the muddy parts of the lawn had been fenced off for the night.

I also learned of a curious tradition. Since this party takes place the day before halfway day (when the third years are halfway through their degree), the fourth years search around town for any third years they can find, then kidnap them. They bring them to our party to get smashed, presumably so they'll be hungover on their halfway day.

The theme for our party was that we dressed up as something starting with P and the first years dressed up as something starting with B. I went as a picketer, my sign said "End Cruelty to Vet Students" on one side and "Say No to Exams" on the other. Three of my friends went as planes, and they had epic cardboard and string costumes that took them four hours to make. Other Ps included: pregnant people and a pregnant nun, several pandas, a pea, a peacock, pajamas, Poliwhirl the Pokemon, a number of prisoners, a few pirates, a penis, a pyromaniac, Phantom of the Opera, Padman (who was wearing a superhero costume and had stuck pads all over it), a prostitute, a paw, a proctologist, and a pine tree. Some of the Bs were: broccoli, Batman, birthday partiers, a barefooted bathtowel, black swans, a badger, and a box. And many more!

I met a lot of the first years, but mostly they just wanted to talk to each other rather than the second years. They're kind of adorable.

Beef Bull Expo

For our genetics class, they took us on a bus trip to see a beef bull expo. The general idea was to look at the genetic values of the bulls and compare it to how much they actually sold for. It was about a half hour ride out of town, though the buses left from some mysterious place on campus that no one had heard of before. The professor neglected to tell us where it was, so my plan was to just follow other vet students.

We eventually made it, disembarking pretty much in the way of everything, swarming across the street and effectively blocking traffic for a few minutes. The expo took place in an indoor arena, the farmers and breeders found themselves augmented by 100 vet students tramping around in a massive herd. There were three main areas in the place.

1. There were a bunch of pens set up, one bull each, with narrow walkways between. It was kind of hard to navigate, since all you could see was a maze of metal bars--the walkways weren't easily distinguished at a distance. That is, until they became clogged with vet students. You could definitely see them then.

2. There were, of course, some food stands (including the obligatory hot chips stand) and a bunch of tables. Around the edge of the food area were a bunch of tables and displays with posters, flyers, and booklets about cow stuff.

3. The actual auction took place on bleachers with a pen in the centre for the bull, and the auctioneers behind that.

So the plan was to look at all the bulls, look at their listed genetic values, talk to supposedly knowledgeable people that planned on buying a bull, and then vote on which one we thought would win. We were supposed to pick one beforehand using information off the bull expo website, and then cast a second vote after we'd had a look around. This was slightly pointless because, experts at bulls that we are, they were just vague guesses anyway and pretty much nobody had a good reason to change their mind.

This was the first year they brought the vet class here, and their timing was, to put it nicely, poor. We managed to arrive a good hour before the auction actually started, but we only had about an hour and half there. Walking around looking at the bulls took about 10 minutes, maybe 20 if you really stretched it out and looked at every single bull. After that, it was a combination of sitting on the empty bleachers, and buying food for entertainment. We had at least 40 minutes of spare time.

Finally, it was time for the auction. Or at least, I thought it was. Turns out that before the auction they had a bunch of awards to give out to the prize bulls, which is cool except that there were like thirty awards. The poor lady called out name after name, as people sent up their bored-looking children to pretend to be proud as half the audience clapped apathetically. Bull names are also really weird, and the categories were mostly cow jargon, so I pretty much had no idea what was going on.

Once the auction got going, it didn't disappoint. Beforehand, the faculty felt they should remind us not to try and buy a bull. The auctioneer was classic--in fact he spoke so quickly that it was complete garble. It was just a stream of words shouted as loud as possible. He was so enthusiastic about it that he broke the mic just before we left. The few bulls that we had time to see auctioned sold for about $7,000. The professor mentioned the most expensive bull he'd ever seen was $180,000.

In class the next day, the professor had made a graph of the genetic value versus auction price, and the most expensive bull sold for $28,000. The one I voted for, lot 126, only sold for $11,000, even though its genetics were through the roof. Looking at the graph, she pointed out that the farmers are pretty much in their own little world, because the most expensive ones weren't really the best ones.

The best moment of the trip may have been when it was time to leave. We waited for bidding to end, so we would be between bull sales and not disrupt people trying to buy one. So all at once, a good third of the audience gets up, and as there was only one exit and most of us were sitting on the opposite side, there was a very unsubtle mass exodus across the ring.

Professors: Raktajino

For the physiology of lactation, I rather liked the professor. He was this tall, skinny, middle-aged fellow, and he seemed pretty gay if you ask me. He definitely had some of the mannerisms and gestures. Anyway, his section was pretty challenging, but I liked him.

During his last lecture, he told us about the "tap reflex," which is where the calf bunts its mother's udder, which causes a reflex contraction and milk let-down. He mentioned that if you google tap reflex, there's a very different one that involves human males and erections, so he warned us that we would have a hard time finding information about the milk one on the internet. Now, I googled tap reflex and all I got were results for the knee-jerk reflex, so I don't know what he's talking about, but that's not important.

He was about to continue on with the lecture, when one of the outgoing members of our class says, "What do you tap?" This elicits a round of laughter, and she adds, "Just curious you know, since you brought it up..."

The professor smiles and is obviously not about to go into it, so he kind of waves off the question. Then one of the Americans (male) in the back pipes up with, "I'll show you later."

End that story, start new story.

We were given a practice test and access to the old exams, and one section was a matching question, where you match the words to the best description. He wanted to use all the letters of the alphabet I guess, because down at the bottom there were some made up answers. One of them sounded like an old god or some relation to C'thulu. The other was Raktajino.

Now, at this point I was just getting into Deep Space Nine (I am now a fan). I saw that, and I thought, "Hmmm... that's suspicious." I looked it up, and I'm pretty sure Raktajino is not a real thing, the only possible definition is a Klingon coffee. He's a Trekkie! Unfortunately, he didn't put it on our exam, so I didn't get the chance to make a comment.

One question he did put on, was "What percent lactose does human milk contain?"

• 5%
• 7%
• 9%
• 11%

Um. What? Ok, there was a table in the study guide, but it had like 30 species on it, and had values for a good handful of milk components (like percent protein or percent fat). I'd learned that human milk has a higher than average lactose concentration, but not the exact percent, jeez! How will that knowledge ever help me? Even if it were asking about sheep milk, I don't see how that's useful, but no, he's asking vet students about human milk composition. He lost all his cool points for that one.

Library Assignment

Some professor or other decided that we need practice using the library and its databases, so that we'll be familiar with doing literature searches and whatnot when we're big bad vets. It's a reasonable aim, since most of my classmates probably didn't read a hundred stupid journal articles for their undergraduate senior project like I did. However, the assignment they gave us needs to be sorely rethought.

What we were supposed to do was pick any anatomical structure we wanted, then look up four journal articles about it. We were supposed to write a nice little essay giving a description of the structure and its normal function, and devote a small section to clinical signs of disease and dysfunction. Sounds nice when I put it like that, doesn't it? The catch is that we had to use no more than 150 words. One hundred fifty words! Four references, not counting any textbooks we needed to supplement the anatomy description. 

No more than 25% of the essay was supposed to be about the disease part. 25% of 150 words. 

The thing about primary literature, is that people doing studies don't bother describing their structure of interest, because it's a waste of space. You're not going to be looking up a study of drug effects on the development of auditory ossicles if you have no clue what the fuck an auditory ossicle is. Most literature assumes you actually know the stuff that you were supposed to learn in med school and can easily reference in the textbooks. Studies are going to be about pathology, clinical signs, drugs, that sort of thing. So in practicality, you end up with four references for 25% of a 150 word essay. Not to mention that the citations are included in the word count.

To make matters worse, we have to peer review four other people's (anonymous) essays and hand them back in. Supposedly, by marking someone else, we'll learn how to better improve our own writing. What were they thinking? How could anyone possibly learn anything from a 150 word assignment? Everyone was too busy trying to squeeze unnecessary words out to worry about writing well. The result was choppy sentences and truncated thoughts. This isn't helping us learn to write concisely, and it's not helping us critically assess each other because there's just not much you can say about something so short.

We were supposed to include the word count on the page. I had 151 words and said my count was 150, no big deal. Three of the ones I had to grade also said their word count was 150 words. One of them was a line or two longer than the others. Hmmm.

I counted to be sure. They had 160 words. Nice try.

Describing a Place

Topography sort of means "describing a place," from its Latin roots, and in medicine it means looking at and feeling the surface of the patient and knowing what's up underneath. It's the reason I haven't posted hardly any stories lately (I had Mr Vet saved up to post when things got dire), because it took the form of an oral exam this past week.

The exam consisted of an examiner, a scribe, a dog, and me. The dog's name was Merlin and he looked kind of like this (picture from google):

The first thing I did was pet the dog. The first thing I was actually supposed to do was pick out four cards from different piles, and each one had two questions on it. The way it worked was he would name a structure, and I would palpate it and describe anything I could think of--nearby structures and landmarks, function, clinical significance. The entirety of anatomy examinable, both this year and last, and more than two weeks of study. It took about 10 minutes.

Unfortunately I wasn't just nervous, I was embarrassed about being so nervous. I petted the dog a lot, it didn't help.

The upshot is that now you can pretty much point anywhere on a dog, and I can tell you all kinds of shit about whatever it is you pointed at. 

PS: It is way easier to find the femoral pulse on an alive dog than on a dead one. I was unduly surprised when I felt it.

Mr. Vet

Every year, the third years celebrate "halfway day," which, as you might guess, is the day they are exactly half way through with their degree. This tends to involve a big trip with the whole class going off to do something crazy like sky diving. Halfway day is in the second semester, and they spend pretty much the entire first semester fundraising for it. Doubtless, I will have many stories involving halfway day fundraising, considering the sheer number of events associated with it, and next year my class is the one that's going to be saving up.

One of the first major fundraisers this year was an annual event called Mr. Vet.

You may not be aware, but male vets are an endangered species. In our class of 100, I believe there's less than 20 guys. So in a celebration of manliness, each class votes two representatives to enter the Mr. Vet contest. Since the first years don't start until second semester, that's four classes and eight contestants. There are three stages: formal wear, swim wear, and talent. The contestants are also given a steady supply of alcohol throughout the whole event. They are judged by a panel of vet faculty; if I remember correctly there were two girls and four guys. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a steady supply of alcohol too.

So the show started at 8pm. I got there with my friends at 7:30 and we had to sit way in the back (these are all pictures other people took). I had to sit on my feet and crane my neck a lot and I'm pretty sure I couldn't see a lot of the funny stuff, such as their footwear or anything that happened near the ground.

Since this was the first time for our class, our guys didn't really know what to expect and ended up overshadowed by the upper years. For the formal wear, one had a dress and a beard, and the other was smart enough to give beer bottles to all the judges. Some of the other years were a bit funnier, putting on accents or just having more interesting outfits, but overall the formal wear was just a warm up. One of them thought he was a comedian and reenacted a Rowan Atkinson skit, but he really couldn't pull it off well. Another, not in the picture below, went on in fluorescent green tight pants and sparkly blue jacket, and flirted with the MC (this is important for later).

The swim wear section was much more interesting. One of our guys was the only one awesome enough to wear a bikini, but frankly all of them were hilarious. Almost all the acts included stripping, often of a completely ridiculous outer layer, and some poor dancing. Rowan Atkinson sketch guy got a lot of cheers for his daring G-string attire and triathalon dash and bike up the centre aile before stripping down. They each got to pick a music track to play when they came on, and I'm sorry I can't remember what any of them were now. You can just take my word that it was funny.

The talent section was the longest and had some of the best acts. Unfortunately there was a very marked trend of decreasing quality. The first guy up did an elaborate medley of songs, accompanying himself on the keyboard and with a guitar buddy, in which he had reworded the songs to fill them with vet jokes, references to faculty, and having an overall gay theme. This particular contestant was the same that had the tight green pants in the formal wear, and was now dressed in a nice pink outfit.

I don't remember the order exactly, but one of the next contestants did the classic can't-play-an-instrument-but-actually-is-really-good-at-it spiel. He started off with the good old "I found this violin in the attic and learned Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," played it horribly, got cheered for an encore, then of course played some popular Bach or other beautifully and dexterously. From there, the acts just went downhill. There was a guitarist and a guy that sang karaoke, and a lot of bad dancing. Rowan Atkinson fellow did another awkwardly unfunny rendition, and the crowd screamed for more of his near-nudity instead. One guy just kind of bounced around without much aim; he probably had a few too many to drink at that point. The upside to that is that one of the anatomy professors had also had a few too many, and the contestant actually got the judge up bouncing around drunkenly on stage with him.

The drunk professor is the one on the right. I think this picture is a good indication of the quality of some of the talent acts.

Our guys were the last to go. The first one, obviously smashed, called up a girl to the stage and gave her a little dance. Having set the standard of bribing the judges, they were very displeased when he didn't return with a second round of beer, and his score suffered accordingly.

When it was time for the second of our representatives, no one had high expectations for a grand finale. Amazingly, he surprised us. There was some set up involved: a table, bottles, some other stuff. Then he comes out in his sad clown costume, and actually does some fancy slight-of-hand. He did some juggling, and a lot of tricks with open bottles and fluid-filled cups. He handled them deftly, filling cups, transferring liquid, and taking plenty of drinks in between. He set a few things on fire and juggled those around too.

Then--then it was time for the final judging. Time to pick a Mr. Vet! Also, the two woman judges were in charge of selecting the second place "Hot Damn."

The winner of Mr. Vet 2011 was tight-pants gay-joke guy (5th year), who was also my personal favorite (I know I don't have a specific picture of him, but there are enough other pictures). The Hot Damn was none other than Rowan Atkinson guy (3rd year), considering that when he had his clothes on, all the judges could hear from the crowd was, "Take it off! Take it off!"

Then, of course, it wouldn't be a vet event without random nudity and streakers at the end.

Surgery Crossword

Across

2 Most common malignant primary tumour seen in the canine spleen (16)

6 Group of antimicrobials that includes enrofloxacin & ciprofloxacin (16)

7 Deliberate, surgical fusion of a joint (11)

9 Hindlimb nerve originating from L6-S1 spinal segments (7)

10 Minimally invasive surgery using a camera to evaluate the abdominal cavity (11)

11 Attachment of the stomach to the abdominal wall to prevent GDV (10)

12 Type of passive drain, and suburb in Auckland (7)

13 The presence of lymph & triglyceride fats within the chest cavity (11)

17 Region of the forelimb that consists of the radius & ulna (12)

18 Abnormal angulation of a bone or joint laterally, away from the midline (6)

19 Group of fluids containing large molecules that remain within the vascular space. Includes plasma and hetastarch.

20 Short section of small intestine that has an antimesenteric vessel (5)

Down

1 Condition seen most often in older labradors, characterized by respiratory stridor (9, 9)

3 Section of a long bone between the physis and diaphysis (10)

4 Suture material consisting of a single strand (12)

5 Surname of the inventor of the TPLO procedure (6)

8 Tissue partition that separates the two sides of the chest (11)

14 The most proximal point of the ulna (9)

15 Chondrodystrophic breed of dog with highest incidence of Type intervertebral disc extrusion (9)

16 Paired cartilage structure within the stifle that contributes to stability, but frequently injured following cranial cruciate ligament rupture (8)

Professors: Class Should Be Over Now

Our professor for renal physiology was pretty good, except for one huge pet peeve of mine. She always, consistently, without fail, every time went over the time limit. I don't just mean two or three minutes, I'm talking five to eight minutes over.

This is of course a nuisance because we have to get to our next class, and it's especially bad if you need to run a quick errand, such as grabbing something from your locker in the vet tower or getting a drink from the student shop. What really gets me though is that I found I often fill up two sheets of paper, both sides, in the space of a lecture. In a lecture like physiology with a lot of information, I will be right at the end of my second sheet of paper when those fifty minutes are up.

What happened to me was that every single one of her lectures went over time enough that I couldn't fit all the extra info into the margins of my page. I had to either write really, really small and/or cramped, or start a new page. I hate starting a new page when all I will have is a paragraph at the top on one side. I hate it!

This flaw almost drove me mad. It happened every time.

Professors: Yeay

One of our genetics professors is remarkably boring and useless, but his accent does spice up class. Here is a collection of some of his more interesting pronunciations: (bolded my favorites)

A: yeay
Acquired: ackweid
Allergy: allegedly (maybe closer to allege-ly)
Animals: aneeMALs
Both: boat
Class three: glass tree
Consumer: conzoomer
Determine: dee-ter-MINE
Develop: double-up
Digestion: dilezhion
Domain: domayan
Epidemics: epida-mix
First: fahst
H: hech or het, depending (MHC is em-het-see or m'etsee)
Homologous: homo-log-us
Lamb: lamp
Lengthy: lendy
Liquid: lickvid
Linkage: engage
Memory: mammary
Progenitor: progen-ate-or
Questions: quotients
Recessive: recessill
Reject: rezhect
Resilience: res-eye-lee-ence
Respiratory: resprayrty
Response: resp-ow-nce
Successive: successill
Surface: suhfass
Those: dos
Those breeds: dosbrees
Through: true
Two hours: two owvus
Vaccines: vaxin
Vomiting: vomishion
Which: veech
X: yecks

If you don't understand, don't worry, he will explain you later.

CPR

SCVECCS is the Student Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Society, and they have lots of interesting seminars and workshops. Recently I went to a CPR lab.

I've taken human CPR courses before, and chances aren't bad that so have you. I remember having the fake chest and practice defibrillator. Well, this wasn't like that. It was in the wet lab, which is a room kind of like a mini-version of the anatomy lab and all sorts of stuff goes on in there. There were two groups, I was in the second, and the first group went more than an hour over time. When we finally went in, they were still trying to finish up, and the first thing I saw was a room full of vet students sticking needles and tubes into the dead sheep that were sprawled everywhere. They were dirty and bloody and the room smelled rather like blood and sheep, as you might expect. I did actually find it pretty unpleasant at first, but as soon as we started doing stuff it improved a lot, since focusing on the techniques precluded focusing on how disturbing a few of the sheep were.

There were four stations.

• The first one my group did was intubation, which is sticking a tube down the trachea so the patient can breathe. This is supposedly quite difficult in sheep, and the demonstrator took a long time trying to get it in. When it was our turn, one guy started off on that sheep, so I went over to the second sheep. It was really easy and took like a second for me and the person with me. One cool part is the scope that you stick down their throat; it not only holds down the tongue and other structures out of the way, but has a light on the end so you can see.
• Warning possibly disturbing mental image: the sheep for this one were cut along their cheeks like the Joker from the Dark Knight so we could open their mouths better, since they were in rigour mortis. You can imagine why I thought it was a little creepy at first, when one of the first things I saw upon entering the room was bloody dead Joker sheep.

• The next was putting catheters into veins. This is slightly more difficult in dead animals, as they have no blood pressure. Anyway, there are three main sites you can try (jugular, cephalic, and saphenous veins), and we stuck them all. Maybe. It was kind of hard to tell.

• The third involved drawing blood, and instead of sheep they had rubber dog heads. These things are ancient and full of holes because they've been jabbed so many times, and the tubes inside representing the veins are so leaky we couldn't actually get water out like we were supposed to. They also showed us the crash cart and cave us a little description of what was inside.

• The last station was doing actual chest compressions. There were some more dead sheep, but also an awesome stuffed dog. It was black and long-haired, had a zipper up its belly, and looked kind of like cookie monster with teeth. Unlike humans, you have the animals on their side rather than their back. On really small animals, you can even just use your thumb and fingers to squeeze their chest. Also since they're animals, you have to aim for 100-120 beats per minute, so pretty quick.

Despite all the effort and technique involved in CPR, they told us the recovery rate is 5%. That's counting patients that arrest during anaesthesia. If you only count patients that come in (say, hit by a car), it's down to 1%. Makes it seem a little futile.

Med Students Must Not Do This

As part of our class about grass, we have grass labs, of course. To be fair, we've only had a few of these, but still.

The first couple were pretty much showing us grass. We all had to hitch rides out to some farm units associated with the university and tramp around looking at the plants. Seriously, we spent two hours at a time watching the little professor hold up roots and leaves and talk into the wind. Then some person would ask a question, and he'd take it as a cue to go into depth on some study or other, then remind himself of another idea, and go off about that.

The best part is that there are two professors that are involved with the grass, and the main one was always bouncing off the second with a "What do you think?" and used that to ramble away onto even more long-winded thoughts. However, the other guy tended to disagree with the first one more often than not, and they'd have a very polite but hilariously opinionated argument while still trying to lecture us. This is of course while we are all sitting outside on a farm.

Watching the dynamic between the two professors, you'd think that this whole grass lab thing could be solved if they just got a coffee together a few times a week.

After a few labs of essentially watching grass grow, it was time to learn some pasture management techniques. For instance, deciding how much grass there actually is. We were taken to a teaching unit with a bunch of little paddocks, and he showed us a few we could use as standards. Then we went off and eyeballed each paddock, attempting to guess the amount of grass (it's measured in kilograms of dry matter per hectare, if you're wondering).

The next step was to use the two different grass measuring sticks. One is an electronic meter and when the metal tip touches the grass, the grass acts as a capacitor, so the more grass there is, the larger the capacitance. It uses that measurement to calculate how much there is. It also makes a beep every time you stick it down. The other stick is a "rising plate meter" which is like a hubcap on the bottom of a ski pole, and it measures the average height of the grass. So for two hours, we have more than a dozen paddocks swarming with vet students, all walking in straight lines and climbing over fences, stopping every step to pick the meters up and down, either beeping, or swinging around a hubcap on a ski pole.

For one of the labs, we also had to count the sheep for our calculations. I don't know if you've tried to count sheep while actually awake, but I can tell you I was glad I wasn't the one trying to do it. Someone had to get into the paddock with them and find a way to keep track of which ones they'd counted. Sheep do not appreciate you getting too close to them, and they also tend pick interesting directions to run. There were 80 sheep. Someone had fun with that one.

As it turns out, our eyeballing was way more accurate than when we actually used the equipment. So much for that.

The plate meters come in either circles or squares as you can see. I'm not sure which one is funnier.

That Was Unexpected

In a recent anatomy lab, the professor announced that we were to remove the cranial half of our dog and put it into the preserved material bin.

In other words, "Cut off the front of the dog so you only have an abdomen and hind legs, and then toss the head part out." Kind of like that magic trick with the saw and the person in a box.

I was under the impression that at the end of the year we would be able to dissect the side that we haven't touched yet, for revision for the final. Apparently that's not the case, and having a bunch of dissected tissue is just a detriment since we'll only be looking at the abdomen now. After all, even if you take pretty good care of it, you can still get drying out and damage, which is not good for anybody, especially the cadavre. At any rate, we now only have half a dog.

Things That Are Creepy to Dissect

Warning: this is more graphic than most posts, and I don't recommend reading it if you get creeped out by mental images.

That being said, here are some of the things that I found disconcerting or downright creepy, as well as a few that I was expecting to be worse than they were.

Paw Pad: In the first semester, we navigated our way through the many muscles of the body, and for a long time nothing we did was at all disturbing. I may have even been a little disappointed, because I was expecting anatomy lab to be a bit crazier (it has since met my expectations this year). Even removing the skin didn't feel very weird. It was all good and fun, until we got to the paw. I'm not sure if I can explain why it was so, but there seemed to be unanimous agreement that removing the paw pad was uncomfortable. You might be able to conjure up the same feeling if you look at the nearest furry animal, and picture their thick, callous paw pad alone on a table, cold, attached to some preserved skin.

Eyelid: If you see below, the eye was cool. What was weird was the surrounding skin that was left behind, including the eyelids and lashes. Getting the eye out was super awkward, and since we had to cut everything out, in the end we were left with the ring of skin, which like I said was weird to look at by itself, so I put it back over the socket. That was a bit creepy. Imagine looking into a dog face, with its eyelids open, and an empty socket behind them.

Tongue: Mostly because the dog is dead and preserved, I don't like touching her tongue. We didn't dissect it or anything, though it did come out attached to the larynx (the Adam's Apple area) when we were looking at that. Normally dog tongues are soft and warm and wet and sloppy, but this one was so dry and cold, and rock hard. Not comfortable to touch when you're used to dogs being not preserved.

Lips and Cheeks: In a similar vein, the lips and cheeks are also a bit weird to see and feel. Probably what made them look so unusual was the fact that we had sawed the jaw in half, so a lot of the time we had it folded back or twisted in a highly unnatural manner, showing the inside of the cheeks or twisting the lips in a way that only added to the preserved-cold-dry feel.

Sawing through the face: Sometimes when we sawed through bone, everything was dissected away, but not all the time. In order to look at the inside of the skull in the muzzle, we put the saw to the nose (which, you might notice the theme, is cold and dry and preserved feeling) and just sawed on through the face. Getting the little section of skull off wasn't very creepy except for that first part, going through the nose. Dog noses are attached by cartilage, and if you have a dog you may have noticed how their noses are very wiggly and pliable. They're still wiggly and pliable after the dog is dead.

Nasal concha: After we did that, we could see into the nasal cavity. The way it works is there's a ton of thin, flat bone (called the nasal concha) that's all curly and covered in mucous, giving it lots of surface area. The air goes over that and dust or whatever crap you're breathing gets stuck on the mucous, and the nice clean air keeps going. For some reason our lab guide told us to remove the nasal concha, I think it was so we could see some openings in the bone (like where ducts open, such as the tear ducts). Since it's so thin and brittle, one of my lab partners just took his thumb and ripped it out. And, oh man, did it make such a haunting crunching noise! It is bone, after all, just very thin bone.

Abdominal Fat: If you've ever seen an abdominal surgery, you'll have seen that there's a sheet of fat and blood vessels that covers the intestines, attached at the top like an apron, which the surgeon has to lift away. This is where fat goes on fat people, and it's called the greater omentum. In the live animal, it's quite pink and fleshy. In the preserved dogs, it's very thin, transparent, and lacy. It's a lot like lacy curtains. It's weird.

Stomach: Dogs eat a lot of gross stuff. Digested dog food is one thing, but ours had tons hair (mostly dog hair), and even worse, a bunch of chewed up bone pieces she must have been fed. The inside of her stomach was pretty full. It was grainy or sandy to the touch. It was not cool.

The things that I expected to be worse:

Ribs: As I mentioned previously, the ribs are sort of in the way if you want to look at stuff in the thorax. What we did was to snap the bones at each end, but leave the muscles and everything attached, so it made a flap we could lift up. Snapping the ribs was actually pretty fun; we used bone cutters that are basically giant wire cutters. Since it was the first bone cutting lab, they had forgotten to put out safety goggles, and I tried to convince my lab group to let me do it since I was the only one with glasses. They weren't fooled, however.

Eyes: This is the classic thing you'd expect to be unsettling, especially when you cut them up and look at the goop inside. As it turns out, I didn't find it nearly as creepy as the empty eye socket, possibly because it's complicated enough to keep you interested in what you're seeing without getting grossed out. The lens was pretty cool too, it was a hard, oval little white thing rather like a hard candy.

Heart: To allow us to see blood vessels in the cadavres, they're filled with latex (red for arteries, blue for veins), so this transforms the hearts into very solid, latex-filled lumps. In order to actually understand the interior of the heart, we were given fresh sheep hearts to handle and dissect. This involved sticking lots of fingers in the chambers, and feeling soft flesh instead of the unnaturally dry, hard preserved material. It was a very good way to see what openings were where and was probably one of the best labs we did.

Brain: As you might have gathered from some previous posts, we took the brain out of our dog. Dog brains are pretty small--I look at my dog and feel pity--and they're shaped differently from a human's, because the spinal cord goes straight out the back rather than downwards from the bottom. It was a rubbery, squishy thing, kind of like those stress balls, and I spent a good portion of the lab being the one to hold it. Later on, we used a "brain knife" to cut it into transverse sections, which is like a small ruler with a sharp edge. That was cool because we could see all the structures inside the brain, and put it back together to see how it works in 3D. Some of the brain labs felt very Young Frankenstein.

Professors: Scratchy Voice

I really liked studying the cardiovascular system last year, but the lectures were a little bit taxing on the ears.

The professor that taught us about it was this old, high-pitched little lady whose appearance and voice reminded me an awful lot of Delores Umbridge in that Harry Potter movie. Her ridiculously scratchy voice made it very difficult to concentrate on anything she was actually saying.

Something that I really didn't understand about her is why she always used human information, images, and studies. Some things, you do have to depend on studies based around human medicine, because no one ever thought to figure it out for domestic animals, but the heart is not one of those things. It's pretty central to things being alive. My guess is that she either is too lazy to look for a veterinary textbook, or she didn't get accepted to med school and is still bitter about it.

There are pictures of animal hearts in my anatomy textbook, I don't see how she could possibly have a hard time finding one. If there's a basic diagram of a person, why couldn't she put a picture of an animal to show the same thing? I just don't understand.

What was that sound?

A few weeks ago, we were in anatomy lab, looking at the skull and brain. Since we've already dissected all the muscles of the body last year, our dog is not really in one piece on her left side. The left limbs are pretty butchered and I think they're both unattached from the body. Since we were looking at the skull, we wanted her flat on her stomach, not lying on one side, and in order for her to lie flat we had to dangle her right legs off the edge of the table. Otherwise, the right legs would prop her up, but there wouldn't be left legs to do the same, and the cadavre would lean sideways.

At one point, we're foiled by some structure or other, and all five of us gather around a large poster nearby to see if we could match what we were seeing to the diagram. While our backs are turned, we hear an odd shthlap! 

We look back, and our table is curiously missing a dog. Out of the entire lab period, the cadavre decided to be unbalanced and fall off right at that moment. Fortunately, none of the faculty were nearby, or we probably would have gotten another lecture on the happy, tail-wagging dogs.

Saws and Chisels

Warning: this post could be disturbing to some.

Several times now, we've had to cut through bones in anatomy lab to get to what we want to look at. The first time was in the thorax, where we had to break off the ribs so we could look inside and see the heart and lungs and stuff. This involved using a pair of giant wire cutters ("bone cutters," sure) to snap the ribs at both ends with a loud crack. We left the muscles and everything in place, so that the thoracic wall makes a little flap that we can lift to peek into the thorax. How cute.

We only needed to go through bone one other time last semester, to see the spinal cord, and the rest of the bone sawing has been happening this semester. You see, this semester, we've spent seven weeks just looking at the head. There's a lot to see! Unfortunately a lot happens to be inside the head.

The thing that really made me want to tell a story about all this bone stuff is the noise. I already described the wire cutter bone cutters, but clearly that's not going to work very well for something like a skull. Our other options are saws and chisels.

My group likes to use the saw. It's completely barbaric feeling, but it gets the job done. The saws we have are these square things about as long as your forearm, that aren't too far off from this frightening picture I got from google:

I'm sure you know how a saw sounds. Schrrck-schrrck-schrrck-schrrck. Usually we have one person sawing and the other four trying to hold the cadavre still. Sometimes we have everything dissected away and are right down on the bone, and sometimes we're just flat out sawing through the face or some such thing. That's always a little weird feeling.

A lot of other groups like to use chisels. I know this because you can hear a dozen chisels clinking away throughout the room. If you stop to listen, it sounds just like shop class. Chink, chink, schrrck-schrrck-schrrck, chink, clunk, clink, chink!

That said, what is it we're actually doing? As much as it might sound like it, we're not just tearing the face apart. The first sawing/chiseling we had to do was so we could get a good look at the jaw, and later we carefully took out a section of the muzzle, but the best was definitely when it was time to look at the brain. Despite having giant, unwieldy saws, we needed to plan and cut very carefully. You probably noticed that skulls are round, not square, and it's definitely not a good idea to start sawing into the brain. When we finally prised off the cranium, we learned that we had to then go hack off bone around the spinal cord so we could actually cut the brain stem and get the brain out. It was a long day.

At the end of the day, as normal and reasonable as it may have been at the time, it just does not do to try and tell your non-vet friends how you sawed a dog's face in half today.

Professors: The Little Professor That Could

One of our professors is an adorable, round little bald guy. He's super nice and cares for all his students. What does he teach? Grass.

As a subset of Nutrition, we have a once weekly lecture on agronomy. That's basically learning about grass and pasture. You'd be surprised at how passionate some people can get about grass. The lectures are pretty good, and they're interesting except for the fact that they are about grass.

This guy cares so much for his students. He's willing to spend as much time as anyone needs to teach them about grass, saying that we pay enough to get as much one-on-one time as it takes. We have an assignment to do that involves a lot of work in spreadsheets, and he constructed a fancy template, examples, and even set it up so if we enter data points into the template they will automatically form a graph. Before giving us any problems, he pretends he's a student and does them himself to make sure they're reasonable. Even during lectures, he's always commenting on the body language, and if people look too bored he'll adjust the lecture accordingly. He'll also make sure to give us as much extra readings and resources as any A+ student could ever want. Before our physiology midterm, he cancelled his class, since it was on the same day.

How much friendlier could you get! Once, he responded an email of mine, and then sent a second email saying, "PS, keep smiling!"

He does go a bit overboard. I guess he wasn't very good at math when he was growing up because he goes entirely out of his way to make sure we understand any calculations we may need to do. This would be fair, except for the fact that they are some of the most basic equations you can get. It's not really necessary to explain how to plug in numbers, or describe the equation for a line. However, he's very concerned that we might find it patronizing, and will give a polite explanation of why he feels the need to go into detail about something.

One thing that's pretty funny is he likes to toot his own horn every so often. He'll make some comment like, "Back when I was an undergrad, I wasn't a straight A's honors student because I regurgitated formulas. I learned the concepts behind them."

One time, a slide of his read that a farmer had purchased a "fairy farm" instead of a "dairy farm." I didn't notice at first, but I did hear muffled laughter around the room. Poor guy was just as confused as I was, until finally he changed slides and someone pointed out the mistake. He was pretty embarrassed, but that's a great typo if you ask me.

There's something just really cute about everything he says. I think it's a combination of his concern that everyone understands everything and is interested in what he's teaching, and the fact that he's teaching about grass. He often waffles around with anecdotes, grinning about a study or a discussion about a colleague he wants to tell us about. The other day, he went off on a side story, prefacing it with, "As an aside with a smile..." Adorable!

Now, if he were teaching anatomy or physiology, we'd be all set.

Fuzzy Scalpels

I like scalpels, but they gave my anatomy group quite a bit of trouble when we were first starting out.

I wasn't sure how I would feel about dissection, because my high school wasn't very good so I never had the chance to do any. I thought that I might be really creeped out by the dead dogs, or the overpowering smell of preservatives, but as it turns out it's not that creepy and the smell isn't that strong. I was also surprised at how nice handling a scalpel feels.

Sorry if this sounds creepy, but I love cutting with scalpels. It's so smooth! They're really sharp, so they make very nice, efficient cuts, and there's something satisfying about it, like a job well done.

So where does the trouble come in? Here is a picture that I got off google:

You have your metal handle, and the blade snaps on the top (the oblong thing you see in the middle of the blade is part of the handle). You can also see how where the bottom of the blade matches up with the handle, there's a diagonal line.

For starters, we keep putting the blades on backwards. Every time! The pointy part of the diagonal is always facing the wrong way. That's pretty embarrassing by itself, especially since it's been almost a year now. What makes that worse is that we had a very difficult time getting the blade back off at first.

You see, they had these little boxes that served as both a sharps container and an "easy" way to snap the blade off. You're supposed to stick the scalpel into a slot, twist it a bit, and the blade magically pops off. In theory. The first box we tried was so full, we couldn't even get the blade to go into the slot. The next two boxes we tried... well, the blade didn't magically pop off. Every single one of our lab group of five tried to jam it in and twist it around and finagle the blade off, but no one could get it to work. Eventually, we settled with just using forceps to pry the blade off, and hope it doesn't go flying or snap into pieces. I haven't seen the boxes around in a while, so I guess the faculty also decided they sucked and got rid of them.

Just as an ending note, why did I name the site Fuzzy Scalpel? Well the real reason is that I tried putting vet-related words together until I found two that I liked. But! (Warning, this may be a disturbing image for some) The image that came to mind was how when we cut through the skin of our dissection dogs, which are short haired dogs, the fur sticks all over the scalpel. This wouldn't happen in surgery because you shave and sterilise the operation site beforehand.

Professors: Amino Acids

This year, we have a double-semester course about animal nutrition. At first, there was this cheerful old guy teaching us, but then we started a new topic and, with it, got a new lecturer.

His lectures were endless, life-sucking stretches of white slides with black text. He would agonizingly read out every bullet point, talking very slowly in an American accented drawl. He spent half an hour on a single slide one time. Going to his class really didn't offer much return on the time investment, because in your own time you could easily go over at least three of his lectures in the space of an hour. His slow speech did make me laugh out loud once, when he switched to a new slide and it sounded like a complete statement when he said, "This is another slide."

Unbelievably, he was teaching faster than he expected. Despite giving us enough information for half a lecture (especially if you compare to our other classes, such as fast forward textbook lady), he was well ahead of schedule. We got two classes off because of this.

One day, he had to be out of town, so he had a guest lecturer fill in. I guess he didn't trust that guy to have done a good job, because the next class, he spent a good portion of time going over what the guest lecturer had discussed.

I mentioned that he had an American drawl. However, his accent was a little funny. He pronounced amino acids as "am-eye-no" acids. Wait, what? I have never heard anyone pronounce them like that. "a-mee-no" or "ay-meeno" sure, but "am-eye-no"? He said it so often, it became his defining feature.

Sheep Are Expendable

Our physiology labs are often about studying a system by looking at the effects of drugs or electrical stimulation (like nerves). Some of these labs are pretty cool, but it sounds like they used to be way cooler, and also more terrifying.

Maybe ten years ago, they would bring live sheep into the lab, and divide students up into pairs or groups. The students were given a lab guide, a sheep, an anaesthesia kit, and sent on their merry way to begin the lab. The amazing part is that this meant anaesthetising the sheep, doing surgery to find whatever was necessary, cannulating (sticking a tube into) whatever artery or vein they needed, and then doing the procedure. On a live sheep. These would have been students like me and my classmates. Right now, we have as much anaesthesia experience as you do.

The result of this was sheep dying during the lab due to some miscalculation, or worse, waking up and freaking out. The one group each year that could do it right thought it was great, but you can imagine how stressed out everyone else was. Picture yourself tentatively doing surgery on a sheep, pausing to try and decipher the next step in the lab book, and having your sheep suddenly wake up and start kicking around. It actually took the school a long time to figure out that this whole let's-give-everyone-a-sheep thing wasn't a good idea.

These days, if any lab involves a live animal, we just watch a video of some vet faculty doing it. The videos are pretty old, but I really don't mind not destroying some poor sheep of my own. Some of the labs even use computer simulations.

Not everything is computerised these days, though. Sometimes we get to work with live tissues, which usually come from a rabbit (and sometimes we get to use other vet students as the test subjects). One lab that was pretty cool was when the professor had a rabbit heart, hooked up to an apparatus to keep it alive and beating, and we watched how the beating changed in response to different drugs. It was right there, beating.

Professors: Audio Textbook on Fast Forward

One of our anatomy lecturers is a friendly Indian woman who may have missed the point about what a lecture is supposed to be.

Unfortunately, even if she were the most amazing lecturer ever, she's quite difficult to understand. During one of her lectures last year, it actually took me and my friend a good portion of the lecture to realise that the "eesofaygus" is the esophagus. In another lecture, I discovered that the "vasheena" is the vagina.

Even more unfortunately, she is not the most amazing lecturer ever. I know this is vet school and we learn large quantities of information in any given lecture, but most of the time professors put emphasis on key points. This lady tried to fit the entire textbook chapter on the eye into one 50 minute lecture. There was no reiteration of points, no emphasis, she was just spewing facts and details like a fountain. In order to cram everything in, there was never any halt in the flow of words. Did she breathe during that entire lecture? I'm not sure.

That lecture was pretty much the textbook on audio-book. On fast forward.

Earthquake

As part of the safety routine they had to go through for the first anatomy lab, they explained what to do in the event of an earthquake.

Evidently, the vet tower, which is built around two staircases and is eight stories high, is designed so that we should stand in the stairways. They are reinforced and supposedly super earthquake-proof, while the "wings" of the building sticking out on either side will crumble around them. Alright.

Just picture an entire vet school huddling on the stairs.

Evidently we've had a few earthquakes, but I never seem to feel them. One friend claims stuff was falling off his shelves; I wouldn't have known if everyone else hadn't been all, "Did you feel the earthquake?!" Also, by way of being an international student, whenever there's an earthquake in a completely different part of the country, there's a good chance that people back home don't realise it's not anywhere near me. Often a bunch of my friends and family will email me asking if I'm ok.

Stethoscopes

Apparently, picking your stethoscope is not a light decision.

I just ordered mine the other day. It's "ocean blue" and cost $115. The most expensive one, a cardiology stethoscope, was somewhere near $250! There were actually way more colors than you would expect stethoscopes to come in. Some of my friends got purple and orange. There were also options such as peach, burgundy, plum, hunter green, and Caribbean blue.

You might not have realised that there's a lot of factors that go into a good stethoscope. There are so many, in fact, that we were given a guest lecture on how to pick one.

Obviously there's the ear pieces and how comfortable they are, but you should also consider length, thickness of the tube, material of the tube, weight of the bell, type of bell, and structure of the bell. My goodness. If you're going to be outside a lot, you want one that dampens noise (like wind) really well. Going into small animals? Maybe you want a pediatrics stethoscope, since the organs you're listening to are so small.

There are also fancy digital stethoscopes, which are not very good and are outrageously priced, but you can record something you hear and send it to all your vet friends.

No Committing Suicide

I mentioned in my story about VLE that veterinarians have one of the highest suicide rates, and the faculty are extremely concerned that we don't stress ourselves out too much, snap, and jump out of the vet tower. I thought they got this point across very well at VLE, but they must have been worried that we'd forget.

When I first saw that we had been allocated time slots for an "interpersonal skills workshop" at the beginning of my first year, I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I hoped this might be some advice on getting along with your colleagues or your vet techs, or dealing with clients (possibly angry or crazy clients). That could be pretty useful right?

That's definitely not what it was about. I have no clue why it was called an interpersonal skills workshop. Intrapersonal, perhaps.

First of all, the lecture theatre it was in is hilarious. I have had several exams in there as well, and I have to say it's a terrible design. It's a big, steep lecture hall, with orange-y rows of chairs that consist of two smooth cushions at a right angle. That is, they look comfy at first, but don't actually fit the shape of a normal back. There's a small space where your legs go, and the desk part is attached to the row in front of you. In order to get the desk out, you pull it up, then out. Somehow, this mechanism combined with the very tight arrangement of the seats turns it into a trap. There's no way to sidle around the desk, so the only way to escape is sliding it back into its groove, but it's definitely going to hit a knee or a foot along the way. If your legs are long enough, you might have a hard time fitting in the seat at all. The frosting on the cake is the fact that there is absolutely no getting out of your row if there is anyone else sitting between you and the end. If you're in the middle and manage to escape the clutches of your desk, everyone else has to squeeze out as well in order for you to pass.

So here we are, in this massive, bizarre lecture theatre, which makes no sense considering there were only a few of us in there at a time, unsuccessfully trying to sit down, with a creepy professor wandering around the front. And I'm not kidding about him being creepy. He's short, tends to have a stalker-like grin on his face, and talks in this excessively creepy whispery voice. When we finally begin the "workshop," it becomes evident that the next hour of my life will be completely wasted.

Once again, he made us get into those circles where you go around and are artificially encouraged to open up and say deep and honest answers to personal questions. That didn't work out any better than it did at VLE. Then, in the same groups, we had to fill out a worksheet about stress. What are signs of stress? What are ways you deal with stress? If that wasn't bad enough, we then had to go around and share our answers, watch him write them up on the board, and then go through a powerpoint lecture saying most of the same things.

Stressed out? Guess what, you should eat healthy, and get enough sleep. Yeah, I had to go to vet school to learn that.

The absolute worst part was it wasn't actually an hour. After an hour was up, the professor says we should take a five minute break. Wait, what?

Turns out it was two hours.

Tail Wagging Dogs

To be sure that we took proper care of our dissection dogs, they started us off with a speech about showing respect. The anatomy professors pointed out how we should behave like professionals (for instance, not walk into the lab and go "Eeeeeeeeeeew smells disgusting!"). They explained how we only have one dog to last five people for the whole year, so if we didn't take care of it, we would be losing our learning material permanently. They described how much time and effort went into preparing the cadavres.

Because this is a pretty important point, it was reiterated often. Not too far into the semester, we were given a lecture about why these dogs deserved our respect. They were dogs that had to be euthanised due to society's failings. For example, a dog that had been bred for fighting and was rescued: it couldn't be re-homed because of the danger it might attack someone. The anatomy faculty stressed how they had personally been the ones to euthanise them, to see them as happy, tail wagging dogs, alive, and then how they had personally spent months of their time preserving them and making them suitable for our dissections (for example, filling the blood vessels with latex so we can identify arteries or veins).

This is a very touching concept and you can see why the dogs do deserve respect. Imagine having to put down a normal, cheerful dog, just because of a latent possibility of danger. Imagine pouring effort into preserving it, making its death worthwhile by advancing the learning of students. Then imagine some 19 year old waltzing into the lab, going up to your hard work, and complaining, "Eew it's disgusting!" Or imagine a group that didn't bother to store it properly, letting it to dry out or rot.

All that is very serious. However, the "happy, tail-wagging dog" spiel was recited to us over, and over, and over, and over. The first time, I thought it was pretty moving. Eventually it was like "Oh god, not again." Now, we often joke with each other, saying "You're being very unprofessional!" or "Show the dog some respect, it used to be a happy, tail-wagging dog!"

(This is of course in response to something said in jest, we do actually treat our dissection dog very well).

Professors: Very Severe Suffering

One of my most memorable professors from last year was the one that taught the welfare component of Animal Behaviour, Handling, and Welfare (for some handling stories go here or here).

He was this little white-haired guy and the odds were against him from the start, with lectures at 8am. He seemed like a normal professor at first, but over time the offensive parts of his personally started emerging. It became clear that he was a pretty opinionated guy, but the funny part was that most of his audience disagreed with him.

I suppose the best way to explain it would be to start with one of the concepts he presented (in a very black and white, biased manner), which was the gold standard approach to welfare. There is the "incremental approach," which is the reasonable method of taking small steps, improving a little bit at a time, working up to an end goal (in this case, better animal welfare). In contrast, there's the "gold standard" approach, which is where the people setting the rules have an absolute standard and anything below it is unacceptable. The way he presented it, he also implied that these gold standards are usually completely unreasonable.

Going off of that concept, he was very much against animal rights advocates, claiming that they have a "gold standard" view of animal welfare, that no animals should ever be used for anyone's gain ever, and any food industry or research involving animals should be ended. Anyone who's for animal rights feels exactly like that, of course. Then he would argue that animal welfare advocates, like himself, were the only sensible ones, and subscribe to the incremental approach.

He took this a step farther by making a slightly derogatory statement about "liberal tree-hugging, museli-eating vegetarians." I think the oversight in that particular lecture was that in a class full of vet students, there's a pretty good percent of people that identify with that at least a little bit. I mean, are you really likely to be in vet school if you're like "screw animal rights!" and go around kicking trees and hating vegetarians?

Apart from this guy's confidence in being right, he was also amazingly patronizing on a daily basis. He had obviously rehearsed jokes that he would crack and then laugh at, and seemed to think no one else laughed because they didn't get it. An excellent example was:

"The masochist said to the sadist, 'Beat me!' And the sadist said, 'No.' ... You should look those words up in a dictionary when you go home."

It's not that joke wasn't funny, it's that we didn't know what those words meant. Definitely.

Another great example was the last lecture he gave, which was about ethics. It was extremely boring because it was all just common sense stuff that some smug person had decided to arbitrarily assign specific names and definitions. Then when you talk about it using those terms you sound all high and mighty, I guess, because you know all about ethics (and others don't). That's exactly the impression he gave, anyway. He told us four or five times during the lecture that we should hold on to these notes and take another look at them in fifth year.

He actually said that we would understand them then. He clearly didn't think we understood them at the time; I mean, after all, we were only first years so what would we know about ethics?

The last interesting points about him have to do with his actual teaching. Again, an example is the best way I can describe it. Here is a scale you can use to discuss animal welfare:

• No suffering
• Mild suffering
• Moderate suffering
• Severe suffering
• Very severe suffering

I don't think much else needs to be said.

Despite all these things I've told you about, and many interesting things we learned in class, guess what his two 20-point questions were on the final exam? 

1. List 10 pros and 10 cons of keeping layer hens in cages.

2. List 8 pros and 8 cons of keeping sows in stalls.

What made this even more dumbfounding was that this is the sort of thing that the table in the study guide said:

Disadvantages of layer hens in cages:

• Birds are not able to fly
• Birds are not able to run
• Birds are not able to stretch their wings
• Birds are not able to walk continuously
• Birds are not able to forage
• Birds have a limited ability to fly

The exam questions were pretty much lose-lose.