Week #4 -Overwhelmed yet?

My brain was a sponge for the first 3 weeks. I knew half of the material, and the other half was easily absorbed. I think I still know about half of what we're going over, but the absorption rate is way down. It might be psychological, I don't know. All the Sophomores keep asking us Freshmen if we're overwhelmed yet. I keep saying no, though. I know a lot of other Freshmen are feeling it, though. I feel bad for the ones who don't have any experience. I'd be going crazy right now if I was starting from scratch. I guess it also helped that I bought my books right after getting the book list at orientation and then started reading them as I had time. I didn't get even halfway through any of the books, but even having a little bit of a headstart is something.

In Small Animals we just did more physical exam stuff which is getting pretty routine (which is the point) since we have to do weekly exams on our animals with our Sophomores and I've also been doing them on my animals at home and even on the animals I work with at the Animal Shelter that I volunteer doing surgeries for. PE's on anesthetized animals are a lot easier than awake ones! Next week we're doing blood draws in lab.

The sheep left last week (no one dared ask where they were going), so in Large Animals this week we went out to a beef farm in Channahan. The owner was super nice to let us work with his cattle. I'm not sure how many there were -maybe 25-30? We got in the pen with them and learned to herd them. That was actually harder than it normally would be since his cattle are so tame that their flight zone is like 3 feet. To move them you had to get 1-2 feet away, which is scary with such large animals. I was the first one to have to move them, but I did pretty well. As more and more people moved them, though, they started getting bored, so the people who went last had a hard time moving them -glad I was first! After herding them, they showed us into the barn where they had one of the cattle in a squeeze chute. We learned to safely maneuver around the chute, how to put a halter on them, and how to give them pills with a balling gun. It was much easier on the bull than it was with the sheep.

In Radiology we took our first real x-ray of an animals forelimb. Ours came out good as far as brightness goes, but we didn't position the animal correctly. Luckily, we kinda weren't expected to be perfect for our first one, so as long as we could explain what we did wrong we should get all the points.

We have our first exam next week (Monday) in Pharmacology. We're allowed to use one 3x5 notecard of notes for the exam. I haven't even started to think about studying for it yet. I'm falling behind in studying my large animal notes too. There's a lot of information to absorb!