Not Yet a Vet…dot net

“Once Upon a Dream” is one of my favorite Disney songs.  It holds a special place in my heart because the Captain gave me a musical snow globe for my 16th birthday that said “Make a wish, dreams do come true” and it played that song.  I’ve made the same wish on every star, wishbone, stray eyelash, and birthday cake since that day.  I’d tell you what I wished for, but I was always taught that you’re supposed to keep your wishes to yourself or they won’t come true.

This past week, I made my first visit to Disney World.  I may be a twenty-something, but there is some sort of magic in the air in that place.  Captain, who has been to Disney more times than I think he can count, was an excellent tour guide.  We visited the Magic Kingdom and I felt like a little girl again seeing all the characters and watching the fireworks over Cinderella’s Castle.  The next day, we visited Epcot and we rode all of the rides and acted like kids all over again.  I was fascinated by all of the different countries.

We ate dinner in France and walked to Italy while the sun was setting.  Captain happened to find a quaint little fountain right on the lagoon overlooking a gondola.  We had a fantastic view of the Epcot sphere and I was again struck by the magic in Disney World.  Captain handed me a penny and said that we should make wishes in the fountain.  He flipped his penny into the water and I followed suit after making the same wish I’ve had since I was 16 years old.

“What did you wish for?” Captain asked.

“You can’t tell your wishes, silly!” was my reply.  I’m glad he decided to break the rules.  Captain told me that he wished that he could spend the rest of his life with me and he got down on one knee in front of our fountain and presented the most beautiful ring I have ever seen.

We are engaged!

I could not have dreamed of a more perfect marriage proposal.  It still feels like I’m dreaming.  I knew this day would come eventually, but I could not have been prepared for how magical it truly is.  I spent the rest of the night looking at my left hand, and Captain walked a little taller.  We made some phone calls and sent a ton of text messages, but we waited until the next day to tell our parents in person.   His mom squealed and my mom immediately burst into happy tears.  Both of our dads knew it was going to happen.

We haven’t planned a date yet but I’m hoping to get that figured out soon.  In the mean time, I guess I have to come up with a new wish to make since my old standby just came true.

Another post a mere two days after the previous one?  Surely you jest.  For some reason, when I’m not flying by the seat of my pants just trying to get through a couple weeks of school, I have a much stronger drive to write.  Everyone was quite loopy on Friday after our anesthesiology exam.  That made parasitology lab into quite an experience.  It seemed that every time a particular lab instructor walked past our lab table, I was laughing so hard I had tears streaming down my face.  Being a graduate of this program, I think she understands.  At one point we were looking at a preserved slide sample of blood from a cat who was infected with a species of cat heartworm it had picked up while visiting Africa with its owner.  I don’t know about you, but if I ever visit Africa, I’m not bringing my cat.  Can you say lion bait?

Interestingly enough, I’ve been cooking and baking a lot lately.  I went to three dinner parties and was contracted to bring the dessert.  The first one was a vegan chocolate cake.  This was my first experience with vegan cooking and I was a little nervous, but I never back down from a challenge.  My friend’s roommate is allergic to dairy products and eggs, so a vegan cake was the best option.  After several phone calls, I figured out that most cocoa powder is vegan and that a local store carries milk-free ch0colate.  I think the cake ended up looking really nice.

My second contracted baking experience manifested itself as a 3-layer chocolate cake with a cream cheese/peanut butter filling and frosting topped with a peanut butter and chocolate ganache.  Let us all take a moment and consider the deliciousness.  We had rather generous servings and regretted it.  The cake was SO rich that I didn’t want to move for the rest of the night.

After that cake, I decided that the next dessert I was going to make would be healthier.  That is when I decided on fruit pizza.  It’s a sugar cookie crust with a sweetened cream cheese “sauce” topped with fresh fruit.  I used my tart pan to get a nice decorative edge on the crust.  It’s one of my favorite things to make because it looks so pretty when it’s done.

Even though I’ve been too busy with school to think, I’ve still managed to do some fun stuff on the side.  I’m not sure what my next challenge will be.  I’ve been dying to try a new frosting technique for cookies, but that may need to wait until summer when I have a bit more time.  We’ll see!

Recipe credits:

I found the vegan cake recipe on Chowhound.  It’s the recipe post from 12/9/05 titled “Dark Chocolate Vegan Cake”.

The Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake is from a post by the Sassy Radish.

The fruit pizza came from my head/past experience.  Buy a tube of sugar cookie dough and press it into a tart pan or round pizza pan.  Mix 8oz softened cream cheese with 1 tsp vanilla and sweeten to taste.  Spread cream cheese mix onto cooled cookie shell and top with fresh fruit of your choice.

I’ve been pretty busy lately.  That’s a gross understatement.  I haven’t had a moment to myself since the last time I posted.  Since then, I’ve taken a toxicology exam, a clinical pathology exam, a parasitology exam, and a systemic pathology exam.  I have an exam in anesthesia tomorrow morning.  Looking back on the amount of pressure I was feeling, I’m amazed I made it through without spontaneously sprouting at least a few gray hairs.  I have a bit more studying to do tonight and then I’m  home free.  No more exams until after spring break.

I visited my favorite undergrad professor with Best Friend today.  It was a lot of fun to catch up and hear some new stories.  I was slightly taken aback when he said “You remind me a lot of my old dishwasher from my lab (who is now a researcher with a DVM.  I used to work in HER lab).  She never got married, either.”  Hold the phone, people.  Why am I lost cause because I’m not married at this point in my life?  I’m less than 30, the Captain lives in a different STATE, and I’m a full-time veterinary student.  I don’t think it’s time to abandon all hope.  I’ll be sure to put that old prof on my email list for when we get engaged just so he can stop worrying about me.

I know this is short, but I really have to get back to my anesthesia studying.  Just over 1 week until Disney World!

School has been in session for just over 3 weeks.  I’ve taken two exams and two quizzes and I’ve handed in two assignments.  The coming two weeks are going to be brutal.  I have exams Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Monday and Friday.  I’ve never had a midterm schedule quite like this one and I’m more than a little intimidated.  I’m going to keep my head up and plug on through.  After that, there’s only one more week of classes before I get to go to Florida with the Captain.  It’s our first vacation together and I’m SO excited.

This Monday will mark our 9th Valentine’s Day together.  I had to count it up to make sure (2 years of high school, 4 years of undergrad, 1 year of working, and 1 year of veterinary school have lead to this point).  However, we haven’t spent a Valentine’s Day in the same state since our senior year of high school.  Luckily, I only have 2 more year of school left.  Then the Captain and I can celebrate every single minor holiday around.  I think I’ll bake a cake for our first Arbor Day after I graduate.  Perhaps there will be pie on Earth Day. 

As much as I didn’t start this blog to talk about pathology, I feel that it’s the class that gives me the most to say.  Lately I’ve felt as though pathology lecture is a big, morbid game.  The lecturer puts up a picture of some sort of pathological condition and we try to guess what body part is depicted.  You’d think this would be an easy game given that anatomy is a required course first year.  Well, not all of the body parts they show are attached to bodies.  My personal favorite was a nose.  Yes, it was just the tip of a dog muzzle with some sort of skin condition.  There was also a feline ear pinna with warts of some sort and a closeup of two eyes with horrible cataracts.  It’s times like these that make me realize that my classmates and I are just a little different.  I realize things like this when I talk to my mother on the phone and she takes a deep breath before saying “well, I’m glad you’re having fun…”

On that note, I’m off to bed.  I was in bed by 9:15 last night and it was glorious.  I’ve missed that mark a bit, but I’ve discovered my morning goes a lot better when I’ve had more than 6 hours of sleep.  I’ll try to post again before the exams start.

I played with hearts today.  I suppose “played” is a relative term.  I was the designated heart-handler in pathology lab this morning because no one else wanted to glove up and manipulate the assorted specimens that may or may not be older than most of the people in my class.  Hey, classic clinical presentation of certain cardiac diseases only comes around once in a while.  When you find that special heart with a perfect example of endocardiosis or a wonderful demonstration of chronic passive congestion of the liver due to right heart failure, you hang on to those samples.

Anyway, as the designated heart-handler, I was responsible for piecing together hearts cut in various ways to best demonstrate their pathology.  The exercise was quite interesting but the smell was overwhelming at times.  It usually takes a LOT of different things working together to make me feel nauseous, but these old hearts seemed to strike the perfect chord in my nose that, in turn, tickled my gag reflex.  I was actually pretty amazed that I made it through the whole lab.  It was the cat hearts that made me push through.  They didn’t smell and I was distracted from my bad feelings by how small they were!  I can’t believe that my 12 pound cat has such a tiny structure keeping him alive.

I’ve said before how amazed I am that the body just works. It shouldn’t work.  There are way too many integrated systems that all need to function at a certain level ALL the time.  There are way too many places for things to go wrong.  I suppose I really do heart veterinary school even after all the exams and stress and nauseating smells.  I like seeing everything come together, and I like seeing ways the body fails.  You have to know your opponent before you can begin to fight.  And I plan on saving a lot of lives someday. 

Well, all of my plans to blog sometime during the week were never executed.  I’m not sure why.  I wasn’t exceptionally busy by any means.  Unfortunately, that means that I have to be exceptionally busy today (and this week) to prepare for the mess of exams that will soon be coming my way.

Classes are going well.  I’m really enjoying clinical pathology.  The instructors are great and we’re using this computer program that simulates cases and we have to interpret lab data and make a diagnosis.  I know it’s nowhere near the real thing, but it makes me feel pretty cool nonetheless.

On Thursday, I went to see the Broadway tour of “Rent” with Left and Right Side friends and another classmate.  The show was phenomenal!  Several of the original Broadway performers (that were also in the movie) played the roles they played when the show opened in 1996.  That was my brief brush with stardom for the month.

Last night, I spent some time with Best Friend because her husband is out of town at a conference.  We tried this awesome restaurant called HuHot.  You go up to this buffet and assemble your own stir fry and then they cook it on a huge grill while you watch.  The chefs also put on a bit of a show spinning their cooking tools and throwing bowls in the air and such.  I’d have to say that the best part of the whole evening was our dessert order of cheesecake rangoon with chocolate and strawberry sauce.  I love food.

That brings me to my day today.  I have a fair bit of studying to do for my anesthesiology exam that’s coming up on Wednesday and I have to make a trip to the grocery store.  I’m going to make this cake to take to Best Friend’s tonight for dinner.  I am beyond excited to see how it turns out!  For now, I think I need some coffee.

I spend a lot of time relaxing this weekend.  I think I needed some down time after my harsh re-entry into the real world.  I know that this semester is going to start piling on the stress soon so I figured I had to take advantage of my ample free time now while I can watch TV and play Wii without feeling guilty.  I also spent a considerable amount of time on the couch with my cats.  All in all, it was time well spent.

I started to get a little bored so I wrote a letter to the Captain’s little sister (who started college last fall) and I cleaned up my kitchen a bit.  When I ran out of enjoyable distractions, I did laundry and started studying systemic pathology.  This unit is on pathology of the heart.  It never ceases to amaze me how one organ can have such a profound effect on the rest of the body.  Granted this is the heart and it is arguably the most important organ, I’m still awed by the interactions between organ systems.  I suppose that means I’ve chosen the right profession.  Either that or I’m easily amused.

I realized today that along with a general lack of pictures in my blog,  I’ve neglected to post a single picture of my fur-kids.  Well, I’m going to fix that!

Lily is my sassy orange girl and her handsome tuxedo mate is James.  Yes, I am a Harry Potter fan.  When I was in the market for my first cat, I told all of my friends that I wanted a long-haired orange female kitten.  Lo and behold, Lily showed up at the clinic where Best Friend used to work.  She was about a year old, but she fit my other requirements (well, she is technically a medium hair, but that’s close enough).  She had a pretty nasty bite wound abscess and was covered in burrs but Best Friend’s clinic sorted her out (and spayed her!). She was about 4.5 lbs when she came to live with me and she had patches of fur missing from where they had to shave out the burrs and lance the abscess.  You’d never know she had such a rough start seeing her now.  Well, that’s until you see her try to play with something and you suddenly understand why she failed at being a stray.  Even though she’s bad at stalking and often falls off of furniture, Lily excels at purring and lap-warming.

Once I adopted Lily, I knew that I would eventually need a James.  I decided that James should be black and white and that he also needed long hair.  At the time, I was working at a feline-only clinic that would do one spay/neuter for an area rescue free of charge per surgery day.  One day, the rescue brought in a tiny, terrified black and white kitten with an adorable spot on his nose.  He was so nervous that even the tips of his gigantic ears were shaking.  I had filled out the adoption papers before the end of the day and his foster family delivered him to me a week later.  He is still a giant chicken, but he loves people.  The ceiling fan is another matter.  James is everything a male cat should be, in my opinion.  He is handsome and sweet.  He sleeps on my bed in the exact same place every night.  He also excels at purring and lap-warming, but he is considerably more skilled than Lily at stalking and balancing.  James’ claim to fame is his wimpy little meow.  It sounds more like “MEEEEEP!” which is an odd  sound coming from a 12 lb cat.

It’s no wonder I have a reputation in class as the “crazy cat lady in training”

Classes have begun and I think it’s going to take me another week to truly switch into school mode.  I have some pretty interesting courses on my schedule and I’m excited to see how things go.  Here’s my list:

• Anesthesiology/ Surgery
• Systemic pathology
• Clinical pathology
• Parasitology
• Toxicology
• Pharmacology

I’m a little afraid of pharmacology and toxicology, but the others have been pretty fun so far.  We were even encouraged to run fecals on our own pets in parasitology and clinical pathology has us analyzing lab data already.  I love it!  I keep remembering questions I had while working at a clinic and now I can answer some of them myself.  Those vets I used to work for were really, really smart.

The only negative thing that happened this week was my cat’s eye infection.  James started squinting and dripping from both eyes early in the week.  He also had some moderate conjunctivitis.  Luckily, his vet squeezed him in at the end of the day when I got home from class.  He is not happy that I have to sit on him three times a day to put antibiotic ointment in his eyes three times a day, but the discharge and conjunctivitis have almost completely resolved.  He still squints a bit and that makes me nervous.  My limited ocular pathology knowledge has me worried about a corneal ulcer or something stuck under his third eyelid.  I have to take him back to the vet for a recheck anyway, so I can get some of my (probably irrational) fears put to rest then.

It is the first weekend of the semester and I am torn between studying and relaxing.  I don’t have anything pressing that I should do right now, but I also want to be as far ahead as possible when things start to get tough.  I think I’m going to try to do a little of both.  I think it’s going to be a good semester.

I am reminded of my days in elementary school when school was commencing after winter break.  I was always excited to see my friends and to talk to my teacher again.  I was always much more comfortable speaking with adults than I was speaking to my peers.  I remember walking in to school and stomping the snow off of my boots before heading to my coat hook to change into my gym shoes.  I was usually one of the first students in the classroom.  In fact, I used to come in to school early to play on the computer when I was in 6th grade.  My teacher had The Incredible Machine 3.0 and I was slightly addicted.  School just felt…right.  I was supposed to be there.

Starting the second semester of my second year of veterinary school brings back some of those same feelings.  No, I’m not going to get to school early to play computer games, but I am still a little excited.  At a time when most of my classmates sound depressed that there are only 5 days of freedom left, I am planning out how many new binders I need to buy so that I’m prepared on the first day of class.  I got a new backpack for Christmas and I’ve already transferred all of my pens/highlighters into the appropriate pockets.  It feels like the right thing to do.  This is where I am supposed to be.

I know this is going to be a tough semester.  We’ve been told that this semester seems to be a “trough” for a lot of students.  The current 3rd years referred to this semester as “the emotional pit of vet school”.  We’ve been encouraged to stick together and not leave anyone behind.  Watch out for each other.  Don’t let anyone disappear.  I know staff from the personal support and wellness center will be in to reiterate those points.  It’s going to be a tough semester…they’re really trying to batten down the hatches before anything happens.  People are worried that something may happen.  It’s more than a little intimidating.

I’m preparing for the absolute worst in the hopes that I am pleasantly surprised when things do not go too poorly.  I’m still excited for new classes, new instructors, new things to learn.  I’ve been feeling an odd shift lately…one that makes me feel like I’m actually on my way to becoming a veterinarian.  I’m learning things and they’re actually staying in my head.  I’m thinking about cases in a totally different way.  I’m learning which questions to ask.  I don’t know what’s come over me, but I like it.

So I say this, on the brink of what is supposedly the most psychologically-challenging semester of my life: I am going to be a veterinarian someday.  So, like the elementary school student I used to be, I’m excited for school to start again.  This is where I am supposed to be.

I’m blogging from my phone at my parents’ house. I’m really enjoying my time off of school. I think I had forgotten what it was like to sleep through the night. Those last few weeks were tough…tougher than I could have ever predicted or imagined. I’m just glad we all made it through.

I had a wonderful Christmas with my parents & the Captain & the rest of my family. It was a dream to get to spend so much time with the Captain. We stayed with my parents until Dec. 29 when we headed to his parents’ house. I am always amazed at how much fun we have doing perfectly ordinary things. I suppose it’s something to do with the fact that I don’t care what we’re doing as long as we can spend time together in person as opposed to over the phone.

It was a rougher goodbye than usual & I’ve been a little down since I got home. I’ll be ok soon. A very wise person pointed out that it is hard to see everyone around me getting engaged & married while I’m supposed to enjoy my 9 day visit and then go back to normal 500 miles away. It doesn’t make it any easier, but it’s nice to look at the big picture. Soon it will be our turn. For now, I’m going to enjoy the rest of my break. It’s going to be another tough semester but I’m going to make it through!