freaking skunked

I will try not to go in to a rant, but Sunday night was the worst night here since I moved here...Ryan's dogs started whining at 3am...he let them out and they immediately got skunked, he brought them in to bathe one at a time (while the second wandered the apartment dragging skunk smell everywhere). He bathed them wrong...I told him Tomatoe juice, he took a can of plum tomatoes and smeared tomatoe chunks over both dog...which did nothing for the smell and coated our bathroom from floor to ceiling with tomatoe chunks. Meanwhile second dog shit over the entire apartment (with pieces of sock in it). By 4am I could no longer sleep because the smell was so disgusting it burned my eyes, so I left for school over an hour early. I arrived and was the laughing stock of the hospital for 2 days since every I went reeked of skunk. I spent the night at Mark's on Monday to avoid punching Ryan and his dogs in the face, and Mark asked me to sleep on the couch due to my smell (but eventually he caved and let me sleep in bed with him). And the rest of the week was spent trying to "work things out" with Ryan because he refused to accept that we were horrible roommates. Thank god the week is almost over.

I have been on exotics all week, which is A LOT of work, but is rewarding and fun cause I am realizing I know more then I thought I did. The only frustrating part...there is a student on with us who is from the local technician school (being a vet tech is equivelant to being a human nurse). She is very nice, but pushy and controlling. I arrive at school at 6am to start Physical exams on my patients, and paperwork, requests, etc. She shows up at 10am and jumps in to all the procedures, taking control and getting to do more then me. She scrubbed in to our two surgeries today (rat spays) and totally pushed me out of the way to actually participate while I stood to the side and handed the doctor instruments (she was in my traditional place assisting with surgery). I was a little upset, esp. when after surgery she disappeared and I was left to recover the patient, get all the drug RXs. in, paperwork, orders, etc. I was trying not to be pissed, but then one of the vet techs on anesthesia pulled me aside and said "Lindsey, you better stop letting that girl do whatever she wants. You bust your ass off here and she gets to do all the fun stuff while you are stuck with the aftermath and paperwork for 2 hours after." That made me feel better, but I still couldn't change it today. And sure enough, 4pm rolled around, all the procedures for the day were done, but there was over 2 hours of paperwork left, and the girl left for the day considering it a job well done. It must be nice to come in, get more hands on with the animals then most, shove yourself in to get hands on for the coolest procedures, and avoid all the paperwork, client communication, and follow-up for each case. But on a good note, every time this pissed me off, I told myself "Well, in 3 months I will be the doctor calling the shots saying who can do what, so she can have her fun now." I know I never want to be a controlling doctor or bossy doctor, but I get things done very efficiently, and I will be good to my techs, but I will let people who need experience most get it only if they are willing to tackle all the hard work associated with it. Of course, hard work will never go unrewarded if I have anything to say about it. : )

S.A.D.

I think I have a serious case of seasonal affective disorder (S.A.D.) right now. I feel so depressed and lonely, and no matter how hard I try to lose weight, organize events with friends, ask people to take care of me, not get angry at people, find things to keep me from getting bored and depressed, I feel like I fail at all of it. I am not sure if all this upcoming elective time will be a good or bad thing for me. I don't want to be overworked and stressed, but I am finding all this free time daunting and oppressive in a weird way. I am sure it is just a bad case of the blues and it will pass soon, but wow, I HATE feeling like every waking minute is tough. I need some more stimulation to get me in a better mood.

bostonian friends

There are so many reasons why I am so glad that I moved to Medford so close to Boston, and Mark, and a social life. And I really don't regret it at all, I know I made the right choice even if things can be rough at times. But there is one thing that is nagging me, that is bothering me a little. It is a lack of friends. Quite frankly, my vet school friends can drive me nuts at times...I am in school with them for 8-12 hours a day, and when we hang out things all too often become conversations of vet school, and it just makes me anxious and stressed outside of school. So when I lived in grafton I hung out with them more, but wanted to go in to boston to destress and de-vet school. I still have that problem on the rare occasion I hang out with friends in my class, and I wish we could be friends without the whole vet school pretense. But now that I live in Medford I find myself missing them since they are all so rarely willing to come out to visit and hang out in Boston. I have always been a planner and am usually pro-active about rallying friends and organizing events for us all. But now that I live in Boston I find that it is nearly impossible, hardly anyone ever wants to come out! Even when 6 friends encouraged me to host a st. patty's day party, only my roommate and I have RSVPed positive for it so far on the facebook invite, and 4/6 of the original encouragers now have said no, they can't come!

On a good note, I have met some new people here in Boston, but they are mostly Mark's co-workers and friends. I like most of them a lot, but feel bad whenever I ask Mark to arrange something with them. I know i am the annoying pro-active planner who wants to organize, and I think it might seem weird that I ask to plan events with them since they are technically not my friends. But again, I feel like I have no friends out here sometimes, and being a social being I want to organize and have social gatherings with people. I wish I could throw more parties and have more people come, but vet school people are too busy and pre-occupied if already in clinics, and all my other friends live all over the country (or in canada). So I feel like my best bet is to become closer friends with Mark's crew. I guess I will just have to see what happens, but we all know with my upcoming free weekends (every weekend starting March 7) I will find some way to fill up my free time. If my damn IT Band will hurry up and let me I will gladly fill each day with 3-4 hours of running long distances.

v-day and playing with dead animals

Thank freaking god my pathology rotation is almost over. It has been rough, but fun at time too. Tomorrow is my last day, but I might be in on Sunday since I am on call that day from 8-5.

Valentine's day was amazing. On Friday the 13th I took Mark to the Boston Wine School as a surprise gift for V-day and our anniversary. It was for a 3 hour course called "in love with wine and chocolate". It pared 5 types of wine with 5 different chocolates (4 of which were vegan, and one that I think might be a new favorite, this tazo brand that has a cinnamon flavor). They also served cocktails and bread with bruschetta in the beginning, and then dinner after the tasting. It was so much fun to learn how to properly taste wine, I LOVE swooshing and spitting now. And smelling, and swirling! It was such an experience. We also met some interesting couples. An older couple across from us was very friendly, and I made the mistake o telling them I was a soon to be vet, since the older man LOVED vets and started going off on the usual tangents of animal stories. Sadly, another middle-aged couple was interesting but the husband worked for a company that did nothing but test on animals, and even though I tried to spin things in conversation to make it sound like he was not someone I secretly hated, he almost bragged about all the animal testing and killing that happened at his practice. I bit my tongue and didn't start an argument, but I was presently surprised after when Mark told me he was disappointed that I hadn't spoken up more and told him he was wrong, so next time I will not be so quick to hold back for appearance sake.

I have realized that even though I LOVE having almost every weekend off and working regular hours, I am WAY too bored. I have been reading an average of one novel a week. I am drawing in my sketch book on the weekends. I am going to the gym for an hour every day. Yet I still have too much free time. I don't know what to do with myself on these weekends. I started baking various vegan desserts on the weekends too, and lots of chores, I need a new hobby! My mom encouraged me to start writing a novel again. We'll see.

class video fun!

Tufts V'09 2009 Class Video from AndrewQ on Vimeo.

I can't stop watching our amazing class video, it is HILARIOUS!!!!

new migraine studies

I saw a thing on the news this weekend that started getting me nervous, since I get migraines, am on birth control, and smoke the occassional social cigarette (I know, I know, I shouldn't, but it is a bad habit to break despite my manic exercising).

This study is scarey, even makes me wonder about my increased risks with birth control and if there are alternatives I could pursue. Aside from being vegan I feel like I have all the risk factors.

so much for international

I have been in the international certificate program here at school...basically it is an extra program you apply for, finish a project abroad and write a paper on, attend every other week seminars until clinics start, and complete yearly written reports on your progress with your chosen mentor, finished up by a final oral exam with three faculty members in your senior year.

5 of my classmates and I are in the program...and it just gives you a written slip when you graduate saying you did extra in this veterinary medicine field while in school, so no worries if you don't get it. All of us in the program have been completely disappointed with it. There is no guidance, no structure, no organization. And sadly, my mentor happens to be the only mentor whom the entire international staff fights with all the time. All of our projects abroad were fun, but did not result in publishable results (surprise surprise). I published a paper the year before on similar research but it was not the direct culmination of my trip abroad. All of us started to think the program was a joke in our second year. But of course, I became known as the dork who attended every forum (you are allowed to miss two a year) and who read all the chapters of our required text ahead of time instead of an hour before the lecture on it.

So the letter I received yesterday had a lot of irony to me. All my other classmates got emails last week saying they should schedule their oral exam soon. I didn't, and I thought that was weird. I also talked to Katie about it, one of my best friends in the program who jokingly became known as the slacker in the program since she was frequently late to the seminars and never read ahead of time. We all discussed our written reports that we wrote this past summer for the year before, and I was bold and did not hold back that I was disappointed the program did not support its students, and that it could use some more organization. The report asked us to reflect on our progress as well as our opinion of the program, so I tried to give them some constructive critcism. Even more ironic was that I started contacting them in October asking when to schedule my oral exam, and they never replied to me, while my classmates forgot about the exam and decided "They will contact me when they want me to take it, if they forget that is their problem."

My letter basically says "Dear Lindsey, We regret to inform you that we have decided to drop you from the international certificate program. We feel that you have achieved tremendous amounts in veterinary school and have always been impressed by your activities and academic achievements in school. Sadly, we do not feel that your international project and subsequent paper are of publishable quality and have unanimously decided that it is not sufficient to complete your international certificate." blah blah blah from there.

Funny things was I was not mad. This is not going to affect me in any way, it just means that I wasted my time for 3 years attending all those seminars and reading that book. It was not a total waste, I learned something, but I could of done other things instead.

And my mentor got a copy of the same letter. She has not been the best mentor. She is always at odds with the program. She is supposed to be in the program, which is funny since she did not hear of this "unanimous decision" before the letter came to her, and she freaked out. She emailed me and immediately wanted to go to the Dean and once again start a battle trying to get one of the faculty members of the program that she hates kicked off, but I asked her politely to not pursue this. I am tired and in clinics and am not in the mood to stir up any thing on campus before leaving. I felt their letter was respectful and not rude in any way, although all of my classmates in the program flipped as well since they felt I was one of the hardest workers in the program. I guess I have taken the whole "it is one less problem for me to deal with" approach. But I do secretly wonder how much my frankness in my last written report as well as having the one mentor that every other faculty member openly hates affected the decision. Oh well.

pathology...ick!! Dead Bodies!

I am having a rough time on my pathology rotation. Generally the hours are good...for three week it is usually 8-5 with weekends off...tonight was the once a week exception where we had two random autopsy requests come through at 4:45pm so we were there until after 8pm. But the thing I am struggling with is the afternoon necropsies in general. We spend 2-5 hours every afternoon performing necropsies on animals, which is quite a brutal thing. So far I have done 3 dogs, 1 horse, and 1 duck. Being a vegan, meat is unfamiliar to me, and we use meat knifes and scalpels and shears and bone saws, etc. to cut through the skin, bone, tissues, muscles, etc. We take samples from all over the body, which is why so much needs to be cut open or detached and thoroughly inspected. And there is something repetitive, OCDish, and nauseating about slicing through all the tissue with a meat knife. I have found that almost every night I fall asleep thinking of that slicing motion since it is so repetitive and it works well for my OCD, even though it makes me want to vomit at the same time. I have had nightmares for 2 days in a row now, normally about slicing things, dead bodies, and in one I accidentally cut my fingers off while slicing meat (which is so odd since slicing meat in itself is a nightmare for me being vegan).

Today was even more troublesome since we had two late necropsies to start, and when I started reporting all the external findings on the one case, I kept thinking "Hmm..this dog looks familiar...this is like dejavu." Suddenly it dawned on me, and I looked at the dog's name tag and realized he had been one of my patients less then a month ago! I had admitted the sweetheart to the ER, taken care of him for 8 hours, transferred him to medicine, but then followed up on his case for the next two days after that since he was such a sweet dog. When he first came in through the ER with me it was obvious he was a deathly ill dog when you looked at his physical and his labwork, but he wouldn't let you know that with the way he ran around carrying his leash in hi mouth, wagging his tail, and searching for human attention. He had been doing well with medical treatment at home until today, when he went downhill fast...and ended up in pathology.

I know there is a need for veterinary pathologists, in fact, so much so they get paid TONS, but it is not for me. I hope I can make it through the next 2 weeks with less nightmares then usual.

grrr...dogs

seriously, I feel like EVERY day I come home to the dogs doing something bad. Today one of them decided to climb on the counter and eat my last muffin and the aluminum foil, while leaving tiny bits of foil throughout the house. Ryan used to claim that his dogs never ate things off the counter, but even he had to agree that that was a myth today.
Then I went to put my dvd to the Scrubs first season away today, and found that it was under another sheet of paper. When I pulled the case out I saw it had been chewed to pieces, half the cover and back were missing. Amazingly, the dvds were ok, but I freaked a little on Ryan. Not just cause his dogs ate it, but because he hid it on purpose under the paper from me (he admitted to that too, he thought I would of found it earlier since he told me the dogs did this two days ago, and said he would buy me a new copy if I wanted, but I told him I was more pissed he hid it from me then that his dogs ate it).

I would hate to be responsible for telling him that the dogs need to stay in his bedroom all day when unsupervised, but I am starting to think that is the only option I can live with. I hate the idea of two big dogs spending at least 12 hours a day in his tiny bedroom, but honestly, if his dogs eat one more thing of mine in the next week, I might ask him that. This is getting unbearable. EVERY day it is something else...the trash all over the apartment half eaten, the food up high on the counter, my dvd cases! Ughh.

love songs

funny what people like as their love songs...but growing up listening to the Moody Blues as a kid, I will forever love "Lean on me Tonight" by said band.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B3GEnHvgvg

I can't believe I found THAT on Youtube. I actually saw this band during this tour, when this album was released. Nice. Good old memories.