I am so tired. It’s insane how tired I am. I have been having extremely long days of studying pretty much since the midterm. Oh, good news about that, I actually did very well! I’m pretty proud of myself. I also got a good grade on my palpation quiz of the forelimb of the horse (I had to palpate things like muscle bodies, specific parts of bones, nerves, vessels etc). So a little bit more of post-midterm information about my life. My man (and his dog Zella!) was able to come visit for a weekend. It was such a nice break from vet school. We went out to eat a lot, probably more than we could afford, and we picked apples at the local apple orchard as well as went to the movies with some of my vet friends. We also relaxed a lot and I, being the tired vet student I am, kept falling asleep on the couch. Oh! Last weekend I went paint-balling for the first time! It really hurts getting shot, I got some pretty neat bruises and welts from that. I could hardly handle the fear of getting hit by a paintball, I couldn’t even begin to fathom how soldiers must feel in war. Definitely makes you appreciate everything they do for you so that you don’t have to worry about that. Since then, I have done pretty much nothing but study. It’s pretty rare for me to be out of the vet school before 10 pm and I have been trying to work on not feeling guilty anytime I am doing anything other than studying. It’s not healthy to be constantly studying and I have to pretty much force myself to take time everyday just for me. Which is probably why I am still up at 2 am doing this… Anyways, Monday I will be having my second palpation quiz, this time on the equine hind-limb and this coming Thursday and Friday will be my final exams. It will be a bit different than the midterm, which was only one day of exams. The Thursday exam will be just like the midterm (3 hour exam over core classes, 1 hour anatomy practical) and the Friday exam will be integrated. This means that the professors will come up with questions that will incorporate information from other subjects. I.e. if there is nerve damage in this limb, how do you test if it is motor damage or sensory damage, what is physiologically happening to the muscles, and how do you determine what spinal cord segment is affected? That sort of question would test my knowledge of both anatomy (know what muscles are innervated by what nerves and what spinal cord segment contains those nerves) as well as neurobiology (using reflex, superficial pain, deep pain, and other neuronal tests). Or it could be a question such as an animal has these endocrinological symptoms, how would this effect neuronal development and what could it physiologically do to the body (testing my endocrinology, physiology, anatomy, and neurobiology knowledge). It will definitely be interesting to see how well I can connect the subjects we are learning.
In the Wildlife Clinic I have tube fed my first baby bunny, syringe fed baby squirrels, and we have been working on a Great Horned Owl that we got about 2 weeks ago. He came in sternally recumbent (laying on his sternum), anisoscoria (different size pupils), dyscoria (abnormally shaped pupil), leukocytosis (indicative of infection), and a proprioception deficit in his right wing (doesn’t quick have a grasp on where his wing is in time and space). When we took radiographs (where we observed no soft-tissue or skeletal abnormalities) we actually found a microchip! That was a surprise. We called all of the microchip companies but it isn’t registered anywhere so we will just have to wait and see what happens with that. We got an optho consult for his eyes and it was determined that he had a retinal detachment in his anisoscoria/dyscoria eye which he will never be able to see out of and minor inflammation in his left eye. We have been giving him eye drops for the past week and his eyes look a lot better. I will post a picture at the end of this of how his eyes look, unfortunately I don’t have a before picture and only a picture of about a week in of eye drops but you can still appreciate the odd shape of his pupil. Owls will have no problem surviving in the wild with one eye, so pretty much as long as we can figure out what is up with his wing we will be able to release him.
Below is the picture of the owl, you can see his left pupil has a slight indentation to it on the lateral side. He is such an amazing creature. (I am using the pronoun ‘he’ but we don’t actually know the sex).
Oh, and the red tailed hawk that my team has is still with us but is doing perfectly fine. We moved her to a flight cage so that she is more comfortable and we are currently trying to find her a permanent home with human caretakers as we have determined her un-releasable as she is glove trained (meaning she has been taken care of by humans previously). We have a falconer interested in her but she isn’t the greatest at finding her food, so I am not sure if she will pass their hunting test. But we will just have to wait and see.
I think I am going to end this post here. If you have anything specific you would like me to talk about, regardless if it is about vet school or not, go ahead and send me a message! I think it could be fun to post about specific questions you guys have.
I will go ahead and leave you with one piece of information that I have learned today: Glucocorticoids (stress hormones) can increase the sensitivity of catecholamine (fight or flight) receptors in the vessels, increase sodium uptake, inhibit aldosterone (which is a hormone that maintains water balance), and increase the output of neutrophils into the peripheral vessels but decreases their ability to migrate to the tissues to provide their action.
heycorgeous 