An eventful week!

Hey guys! Soo my life has gone from one extreme to another - the past week or so has been crazy busy! Let's get right into it:

• Blood smear: A few weeks ago I mentioned that we were practicing blood smears in Histo - recently we got to stain them and look at the cells under the microscope. Baby steps! Mine was pretty good, and marks the first and only time Histology has seemed clinically relevant (insert unimpressed face here).
• Having a life: A few of the girls and I went out last Friday night, it made us feel old (seeing undergrad students at the bar that seriously looked 14 years old..) but it was nice to be doing something other than school :) We ended the night with poutine which made it even better!
• Horse care week: I just finished with our assigned horse care week. The horse people probably found it boring to walk and groom horses every morning, but as someone with zero horse experience but who has always loved horses, it was fun :) other than the 7:30/8:30 am start times in -22 degree weather, of course. The teaching horses are such sweethearts and it just strengthened my neeeeeed for a horse! Like right now would be great...I'll keep it in my room. That's allowed, right??
• Physical exams: Finally feeling like a vet! We finally got to use our stethoscopes and do physical exams on horses and cows (small animal is next week). I learned that you can (sometimes) make a cow pee on demand...of course mine didn't cooperate, but I saw it happen! We also all had a lightbulb moment with one of the cows that had a left displaced abomasum - translation: one of the 4 chambers of the stomach in cows is usually on the right side, but if it becomes filled with gas it can actually move to the left side. We've been told repeatedly in lab and lecture that it sounds like a basketball hitting the pavement due to the air, but when we all got to hear it we got suuuper excited. So cool! :)
• Hunger games movie night: Last Wednesday our social committee organized a hunger games movie and pizza night in anticipation of the 3rd movie that came out on Friday. Since there are 12 districts in the hunger games and OVC has 12 practice groups, there was also a costume contest. Group 9 has the worst district (grain farmers??) so we wore plaid and then decided to mix it with the OTHER district 9 (aka the alien movie). Our creativity made us win the group prize so now we have a restaurant gift card to use :)

Whew I think those are the highlights! Tomorrow we have our histo midterm so I've been just studying lately. I'm going home on Friday to drop Daisy off :( but it will be for the best, because our 4 December exams start next Monday. I actually cant believe it's almost Christmas break! I'm getting excited to catch up with everyone back home, and of course eat, eat, and eat some more. I'll be posting some time next week, once exams calm down for a few days. Bye for now!

We had a good snowfall this past week and Daisy loooved it!

We can't take pics of the teaching animals, so here's my lovely coveralls and boots

My blood smear! That's a neutrophil in the middle :)

Night out :)

Thanks to Rachel for this genius idea

Cows & Stethoscopes

Hi everyone :) first off - we have a crest! this amazing thing will soon be on jackets and hoodies and the million other pieces of merch I'm going to buy so I can show off ;)

This week I got to touch animals!! I want to say "finally" but apparently lots of vet schools across the world hardly have any contact with live animals until second year, so I won't complain about waiting 3ish weeks!

We had our first large animal handling lab yesterday, which I've been anticipating since I come from an almost entirely small animal background. I've always loooved horses, I've ridden a few times but I don't know anything technical about them. We started with basic skills like haltering, leading, picking out hooves and grooming. My group's horse was named Violet and she was new to the teaching barn so she was very curious but behaved great :) now I reeeally want a horse in the future! Then we moved to the dairy barn and got to halter and restrain cows, which is a messier and more sweat-inducing job, but cows are so damn adorable. Those eyes and ears and giant sloppy tongues make up for the fact that they like to explode with pee and poop whenever they feel the need to. It was awesome to feel a bit like a farm vet in coveralls and steel-toed boots, and I'm already looking forward to "horse care week" where we get assigned to care for a horse daily.

We also got to do a heart lab in anatomy, which ended with the prof doing a live dissection of a horse heart (or was it a cow..either way it was as big as my head). Only vet students would gasp and go "ooooooh it's beautiful" when the valves of the heart were visible.....yes we're nerds!

This week was super tiring with 4/5 days starting at 8:30, and I would have normally slept in this morning (Saturday) but we had our professional welcoming ceremony! My family came down to watch me get officially welcomed into the profession, complete with a stethoscope and an embroidered blue lab coat - I guess I'm here to stay! The speeches themselves weren't all that thrilling for the most part (especially at 10 am..) but our class' presidents gave an awesome speech about the 2018 Ivory Owls - the line that stuck with me was "we get along with every classmate we meet because we're all slightly different versions of the same person" or something like that - so true :) afterwards my family and I walked around some gorgeous nature trails which Guelph is full of.

I'm ending this week very tired but also very happy :) ..until I have to study all day tomorrow for our first test on Monday :( but that's life - and an excuse to drink more coffee!