Just taking a quick break from studying

Mid-terms are next week, so even more so than usual, my time has been spent with my nose in a book (or ebook, more accurately.)

Every week, we have "grand rounds," where we talk over the previous week's case, address unresolved questions, and talk about cases with similar presentations.  In yesterday's grand rounds, one of our professors said something about "can you believe you're only two months away from being third-years?"  Something about that phrasing put a knot in my stomach.  Sure, I know that logically, 2nd year is 3/4 of the way through.  However, thinking of it that way is much different than thinking of it the way the faculty put it.  Holy crap, in 2 months, we need to know what we're talking about!  I'm nervous about it - mostly about having to switch to a new clinic every two weeks, and having to battle the LA area freeways, but I am so excited to actually apply the past two years to something more hands-on.

On a completely unrelated subject, I was listening to Tool's Aenema a couple weeks ago.  If you're not familiar with the song, the lyrics are about how awful LA is, and how Maynard can't wait for California to fall into the ocean.  Anyway, because I'm a nerd, I'm sitting there listening to the song, and it occurs to me that I've lived here for a year and a half, and I'm completely unfamiliar with the geology of the surrounding area.  Sure, I know about the San Andreas fault, and the N. American and Pacific plates, but that was about it.  So I had to look up more detail as a distraction.  I did find out that the reason our mountains here run East-West instead of North-South is because they were on a chunk of land that got moved onto the pacific plate, and got rotated as the plate moved north.  And then I found out that since LA is technically part of the pacific plate, over time it will get dragged further and further North, but will not break off into the ocean.  Honestly, I'm a little bummed to find that out.  It's one of those things that you hear repeated so much, only to find out that it was based off of a misunderstanding of how tectonics works, that wormed its way into pop culture is kind of disappointing.

Yet another reason why I love it here

We had this block's large animal rotation today.  It was nothing out of the ordinary, we just practiced doing physical exams on a cow.  When we were scrubbing our boots and getting ready to leave, I cornered one of the large animal faculty members, and blindsided him with one of the most poorly thought-out things that has come out of my mouth in awhile.

Me: "Random question for you."
Dr. T: "OK?"
Me: "You were talking about pain control for debudding calves earlier, and I was thinking...  You know that crazy guy that made unicorn goats in the 70's? Could I make unicorn cows with the same method?"
Dr. T (who is a badass, and didn't tell me that I just said the most retarded thing he's ever heard): "I don't see why not. As long as you relocated the horn buds before they started to vascularize, it should work."
Me: "So the horn buds on cattle aren't that different from goats?"
Dr. T: "Nope.  That should work just fine."
Me: "Awesome.  When I finally snap and go through a mad scientist phase, I'll let you know how my unicorn cows turn out."

Seriously, how did I manage to approach one of the most sarcastic people on campus, who will pick on students for the silliest little things, and somehow have a serious conversation with him about making unicorn cows without him rolling his eyes at me, or cracking a joke or anything?  I love this school.

And if you're completely lost about this whole thing, basically, this guy, Otter Zell, made some unicorn goats in the 70's and 80's.  Basically, instead of de-budding the neonatal goats like is done customarily, they removed the horn buds, and relocated the two of them into one central bud on the forehead.  The resulting single bud grew into a long, straight unicorn horn.

Ok, so eccentric hippie type creates living unicorns, then fades into obscurity, right?  Nope.  He popped up again in the news recently for opening up a real-life wizarding school. I'm sure he just used a pop-culture icon to promote his own brand of paganism he's been following his whole life, but the concept of marketing a religion to harry potter fans cracks me up.

And for kicks, here's an interesting cracked article that might interest some of you animal lovers.  6 Surprisingly Advanced Ways Animals Use Medicine. It mentions that woolly spider monkeys have figured out how to eat native plants as a form of natural birth control.  That's right.  Spider monkeys are smarter than a big chunk of the people I went to high school with.

A random distraction

I've been so buried in stuff about the eye this past week, that I almost forgot that tomorrow, our group at school is doing a potluck during PBL.  After a brief moment of panicking, because I haven't made it to the grocery store in almost a month, I peeked around to see what I could do with the ingredients I have.  I ended up having everything for some chocolate chip brownies.  I decided to make them in cupcake papers, so I didn't have to haul a pan to school.  Then I decided that plain-topped brownies are kind of ugly, and needed some improvement.  What do you think?

This is my least favorite of the bunch - supposed to be a grumpy looking cat, but the eyes didn't work very well.

Dooberman!

The Goldfish is my favorite out of the bunch

Just got back from the emergency vet

One of my classmates calls it the "vet school curse."  It seems like the normal population can have their pets go for years without illness or accident, but vet students seem to get the sick pets or the accident prone ones.  Today was an accident prone kind of day.

I let Skwisgaar outside, and let him in a couple minutes later.  He sat down next to me on the couch, and started licking his leg.  I looked over to tell him to stop licking, and HOLY CRAP, I CAN SEE MUSCLE! I don't know what he caught his leg on, but it made a nice little deep hole in his thigh that needed to be stapled shut.  Poor guy has a frankenstein butt with a little square shaved into it now.

When we were at the e-clinic, they weighed him, and the number on the scale was a bit higher than I thought.  My dog that should ideally be about 75 pounds is instead 94.  I was already telling Tyler on the drive home, how I need to get my ass in gear and lose some weight with my poor chubby puppy.  When I got home, I checked my email to find that one of the pet food reps is doing their yearly dog weight loss contest.  Perfect! So hopefully over the next few months, I can get myself and Skwisgaar to be a little less squishy.