The Year of the Ologies

Apparently, the second semester of vet school is when they begin to dump ologies on you.  You know; ologies:

-Path-ology
-Neur-ology
-Physi-ology
-Immun-ology
-And also Nutrition and Anatomy but those sound less impressive without that all important suffix

It's only into the second week of classes so hard to tell yet how the term will shake out.  We've certainly got the full range of teaching styles though.  It runs from old-school (really...with a slide projector that he makes the students at the back of the room operate for him) to high tech with powerpoint shows and remote clickers and receivers to compile the input from the class in realtime.  Our brains are having to span not just volumes but decades of information.

We also have considerably more lab time this semester.  Each week holds two pathology labs, one microscopic and one gross specimens, a long (looooong) neuro lab wherein we poke about in dog brain with our "Canine Atlas of the Brain" which was printed in 1986.  1986 and they made me pay for it.  It is also in black and white because apparently color photography had not yet been introduced in 1986.  I don't know because I wasn't alive.  Moving on.  Also a physiology lab and three days of large animal anatomy lab, although we're not dissecting all of those days.  Our anatomy groups are divided into A and B subunits and on alternating days, except when we're only doing bones, or reviewing for an exam, or working on the bovine cadavers, or the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, the A group dissects and the B group studies and vice versa.

So, in sum, I think I spend ~15 hours of the week in a lab which is pretty cool because it means I get to do something.  I am not good at learning on my butt.  I get a lot more out of moving around and learning, like when I'm dissecting or when I'm cleaning the house and making Eli follow me around and read bold terms to me.  He gets a headache, but I get a lot more out of it.  The flip side of this coin is that I'm extremely clumsy, and in the anatomy lab alone have a running tally of one broken skeleton pelvis, one previously labelled femur which might not be described as such so much anymore, a small scar from where I walked into Jessica's scalpel blade, and a 4-inch bruise and laceration on my shin where I tried (and failed) to walk through one of the huge steel racks from which our pony cadavers are suspended.  You will understand, then, why my lab partners were so very, very excited when the instructors handed me a 7 inch knife for our dissections.  Yee-HAAA!  So far no casualties but I'll keep you posted.

Signing off for tonight: 8 o' clock class tomorrow morning.