Q: Describe an experience that changed you.
A: Dying parent.

Q:What was the most challenging thing you’ve had to deal with?
A: Dying parent.

Q:What qualifies you to be a competitive and successful student at our university?
A:Dying parent.

In the same way, I’m getting tired of constantly leveraging my computer background in order to stand out from the rabble.  Is there nothing more to me?  Are there no other salient features?  I guess not.

* To say nothing of how using such adversity-overcoming experiences are then cheapened and ultimately subverted from life-transformation to a mere job/college-interview-fodder.

…

Today is March 2nd, and at 8AM EST I will discover where (if anywhere) I’m going to go for a year long internship.  I’ve already posted my choices in an earlier entry and at this point (2AM, March 2nd) I’m sort of ambivalent about how I really feel about the whole affair.  There’s an aspect of excitement, about finally going some place new, but also there’s a feeling of dread.  Thinking on the numbers of how so so many students are applying for internships and the few that are out there that I want, it seems rather unlikely that I’ll get my top choice.  Really, my preference is binomial – there’s CSU and then there’s everything else.  CSU is nice because it’s the closest I can get to California while still having opportunities to be in a place that has a good ophthalmology program.  Also, it’s only an hour away from Denver which has direct flights to pretty much anywhere (not that I’ll be doing too much traveling).  My other choices are just all over the place, but mostly on the east coast and probably just fine in terms of ophthalmology just not geography. 

It seems silly to worry about geography for just one measly year, but there’s always a possibility of going back to where ever I do my internship for more training (e.g. residency) or work or whatever.  Naturally it’s easier to do so after connections have been made and people met.

There’s going to be a lot of buzz tomorrow after the match is complete.  People’s futures will be more or less decided and it’ll be interesting to see how everyone will do.  I myself, after finding out where I’m going, am looking forward to a nice long nap, followed by a peaceful day of errand-running.

There’s no such thing as heart and lung machines for animals (yet), so the surgery essentially involves tying the major vessels that feed the heart while quickly slicing through the heart (sutures are pre-placed to allow for quick closure).  If you occlude the major vessels that feed the heart, the heart doesn’t get any blood and starts to become deoxygenated and unhappy.  Thus, you can only really cut off blood to the heart for about 2 or so minutes.  In our surgery, someone was on the clock calling out “THIRTY SECONDS…ONE MINUTE…ONE MINUTE THIRTY SECONDS…TWO MINUTES!!” while the surgeons furiously cut off circulation, cut open the heart, figure out what to cut, and then closed up the heart.   Then you wait and hope the heart starts beating and becomes happy again.  I think that was the most stressful part of the surgery – hearing the times called out in total silence with the exception of quiet murmuring between the surgeons.

For Tessa, her heart did not become happy again, which set off a flurry of activity, particularly for anesthesia.  We injected drugs that would stimulate the heart to beat again, and for a while it worked, but then slowly and surely abnormal rhythms came back and the heart began to fail again until it eventually just stopped.  With heart-stimulating drugs (e.g. epinephrine), there’s a steep and quick decrease in marginal returns- meaning that after each successive dose, you get less bang for your buck.  All the while Tessa heart’s basically is not working on its own, the surgeons are manually pushing on the heart (compressions) to send blood through her system while they gave the heart a chance to come back.  Tessa’s never did.  Toward the end, we saw some electromechanical dissociation (EMD) where the electrical signals are being sent to the heart, but the muscle simply won’t do anything.

My impression of the whole affair was that it sucks to have an otherwise happy, playful puppy die on the table, but it was a better fate than dying a year later of heart failure.  Still.  It was interesting how professional everyone was about trying to get Tessa back.  There was no “DONTYOUDIEONME!” just a hurried sense of urgency about getting and injecting drugs as quickly as possible and watching the values on our machines fluctuate until finally there was nothing more to do.  Death on the surgery table is a quiet one dictated by numbers and metrics and I guess time.

* The species, age, sex, and breed have been changed for privacy, so things might not make too much sense if you’re familiar with breed dispositions.

1. Colorado State
2. North Carolina State
3. The Ohio State University
4. Virginia Tech
5. University of Wisconsin-Madison
6. Michigan State
7. University of Florida
8. University of Missouri
9. UPenn
10. Cornell

Hopefully I will get one of these guys.  It’s only for a year, and then who knows.  Something else.  In truth, I’m getting tired of moving around so much.  I don’t feel at home anywhere recently.

I felt strangely honored that I was worthy of being bestowed with a rat from him.

1. Pass national boards
2. Apply for an internship/Match to an internship
   1. Update CV
   2. Write letter of intent
   3. Figure out which internships to apply to
   4. Get letter of recs in order
   5. Send the applications off
3. Finish tear paper -> submit tear paper
4. Submit case-report

Right now I’m working on finishing my horse tears paper.  My other paper was finally published (albeit electronically at first) through Medical Mycology so that was nice.  I definitely enjoy doing the research more than I do the whole publishing process (writing, submission, addressing the [sometimes fickle] concerns of the peer reviewers*).  I guess that can be said of anyone though.

I’ve been on Farm Animal Medicine and Surgery last week and this will be my last week of Farm.  Thank.  Goodness.  Not that I want to seem like a wussy city boy, but cows are gross.  Pigs are even worse.  Goats and other smallish ruminants are actually not that bad.  We have a really friendly goat in the barn right now.  I have a llama patient that hates me but is otherwise pretty cute.  All in all, we get about 3 weeks of Farm Animal-ish experience.  2 weeks in-clinic and 1 week out there in the truck driving to farms and what not.  Is this enough to give vet students a good grasp of Farm Animal Medicine and Surgery?  I’m of the firm opinion – “not really”.

*Although, I have to admit, one of the reviewers really did make a significant impact on the paper.  He/She was thanked in the Acknowledgements.

I read an article online a few years ago and it’s stuck with me through the years about just what the greatest frustrations in daily life come from.  Surprisingly, it’s not really the moment you wreck your car,  break a bone, find out you have cancer (okay, maybe this one might dampen your day a little) – it’s those little frustrations that are born out of something you can’t control.  As an example, one of the most frustrating things in clinics is to be without a leash.  No leash, no controlling of the animal – you can’t take its weight, you can’t reliably get it down the hall to the treatment rooms, you look stupid and unprepared.  So for a few annoying seconds you have to look for one, ask around, and typically the leash will be short and dinky and cut into your hand and not give you enough leverage and distance from the dog so that your arm is getting yanked out of its socket  and you’re tripping over the poor creature who wants to sniff the smells and urinate in the corner.  Small things.  Interestingly enough, the article was about User Interfaces.

So the day before medicine, I’m getting everything together – controlling what I have purview over.  I have my pens, my postits, my binder for patient index cards, my pen light, my book of differentials, thermometer, and of course, my big long red leash.