When you first start veterinary school, you can hardly believe that fourth year will happen. You sit through hour after hour of class and you study until you forget what time you started and then you go to bed and do it all over again. Well, it’s happened for me. I’m a fourth year. I started my year off the easy way with a clinical pathology/parasitology didactic (a.k.a. class, but with a lot more discussion). It was a great refresher on reading and interpreting blood panels and I was amazed at how much of the parasitology information I still had rattling around in my head left over from second year. The half days weren’t bad, either!
Now I’m about 1/4 of the way through my second rotation and this one is much harder for me. Large animal medicine. I wanted to get into the barn as early as possible because a lot of third year was devoted to large animals and I wanted things to be fresh in my mind. Apparently, I am good at large animal medicine on paper but not really in practice. I’m OK with that. It has never been my goal to do equine or production medicine and so I really just have to show up and do my best. I did discover today that I am absolutely terrible at drawing blood on calves. You’d think it would be easy with the size of their jugular veins, but that is definitely not the case. I managed to do my two required calves, but I felt so stupid the whole time considering it took me about four times as long as my rotation mates. Luckily, the resident is fabulous and extremely patient. The whole time I was thinking “please, please, please just give me a cat and I can show you that I have actually drawn blood before and I’m actually really good at it!” but alas, there were no animal transformations and I muddled through my two calves and apologized a lot.
After the calves, we moved to the sick barn and examined some cattle that were experiencing a drop in milk production. It was a great experience to see some cattle that aren’t like giant puppy dogs like the blood donors in the hospital and I got to hear my first LDA ping. I also got to reach in before the vet corrected the problem to see what it felt like. That’s just not something I get the opportunity to do every day. Speaking of new things, I am on call tonight for the first time as the primary student. That means if there are any emergency cases that come in to the barn overnight, I am going to have to go in and help the resident assess the patient and get them stabilized as much as possible. In the morning, it would either become my case (if it stays in medicine) or we would transfer it to surgery (if the case is purely surgical). I’m nervous and excited all at once. It was a really long day and I would rather not go back to school, but I know that being on call and going in at all hours is going to be a big part of the coming year and there is no sense in delaying the inevitable.
For now, I’m going to make sure I’m well-hydrated and I’m going to go to bed early in the hopes of getting some sleep in case I get paged in the wee hours of the morning. And I’m going to cuddle with my cats. 
