Sunday, September 30, 2012

One more week of horses!

I'm posting this from my own couch! That won't get old for awhile.  I'm finishing up my last equine rotation, at a specialty referral hospital.  I've met some wonderful vets, some wonderful interns, and some pretty cool horses the last week.  I have one more week there, then a week of testing, then I am done with horses and large animals for good until I start studying for my national boards next year.

It was fun, and I totally get why the school wants to expose us to as many of the different areas of vet med as possible, but I'm pretty sure I intrinsically knew that I don't enjoy being out in the sun (uugh, I have freckles now, even with my liberal use of my spf 100 sunscreen), I don't like flies landing on me, I don't like getting splattered with cow poop, and I'm not a big fan of having my arm buried up to my armpit in an animal's rectum.  Not entirely sure I needed 8 weeks of hands-on experience to learn those facts.  But to be fair, I did learn quite a bit of not-so-negative things as well.  I got a bunch of ultrasound experience.  I learned that I adore draft horses and jersey cows.  I've gotten a lot more comfortable working around animals that could easily squish me if they wanted to.  It's been a great 2 months.  But I'll be glad when it's over.

Last weekend, my next door neighbor brought her dogs to school for a continuing education class for vets to work on doing echocardiograms.  Basically, her dogs were there for the vets to practice their ultrasound skills on.  She has little dogs, and they wanted bigger dogs.  I told her she could bring Skwissgaar on Sunday, since he's good about hanging out with people poking him, and I've always wanted to find out if he has dilated cardiomyopathy.  I got Skwissgaar at 8 weeks old, since my friend owned his grandpa (his dam's sire) as a service dog.  When Skwissgaar was about 3 or 4 months old, my friend's seemingly perfectly healthy dog dropped dead.  So I've always known there was a chance that my guy had DCM, and I figured I could find out for sure.  So my neighbor gets back, and I asked her about it, and she had the worst look on her face.  So I kind of put her in the bad position of having to deliver the bad news that yes he does, but they think it's pretty early. I'm taking him into school tomorrow for the 3rd year internal medicine rotation, where he'll have another ecg, an echocardiogram, and some bloodwork done. We'll get a baseline of how far along he is, and hopefully with medications, we'll be able to buy as much time as possible before he goes into congestive heart failure, or just drops dead like his grandpa.  Skwissgaar's my bestest buddy in the world, so I'm going to be pretty broken if anything happens to him.

I was sitting on my front porch a few days ago, and looking at my new car.  I then realized that the little decorative hubs that go over the alloy wheels were gone.  I went and investigated.  All 4 were gone, and there's a pry mark on one of the alloy wheels where apparently it didn't come off gracefully.  I hate my neighborhood.  It would be nice to live somewhere where I didn't have to worry about parts getting stolen off my car while it's parked directly in front of my house.

Tomorrow's my 7-year wedding anniversary.  Tyler took Saturday off of work so we could celebrate, and actually spend an entire day together (which was awesome, after barely getting to see the guy while I was living out of hotel rooms.)  We wandered around Old Town Pasadena, and discovered a couple really cool shops.  The first shop was an old-timey soda and candy shop.  I bought these:
I'm a little bit afraid for my tastebuds, when I break them all open.  I'm sure the root beer, sarsaparilla and butterscotch ones will all be fine.  It's the bacon, buffalo hot wings, PBJ and pumpkin pie ones that are scary.  

We also discovered a store called the Gold Bug.  I need to win the lottery, so I can buy stuff from there - they have some amazing steampunk stuff (like this animatronic phoenix,) taxidermy, decorative plates and prints based off of old anatomy books, and various ephemera.  I'm in love, but I'm way to broke to ever afford anything there.  

Anyway, back to the grind.  Hopefully, soon I'll get back to more frequent, shorter updates.  

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