They
waste no time trying to scare you. On the very first day of school, before
you’ve even had your first official lecture, you’re taught one of the most
important lessons you’ll learn in this profession: WASH YOUR HANDS. This is not
the same lecture you got in kindergarten where your teacher instructs you on
proper hand-washing, aided of course by the use of a rhyme. No, this particular
presentation comes complete with an extensive list of the parasites and bacterial
infections you will acquire if you
don’t wash your hands after working with animals. We were even told to look at
the person on either side of us because one of the three of us would probably
get Cryptosporidium from a calf by
the time we graduated. This particular protozoan parasite, like many of the
others mentioned in the presentation, causes diarrhea. Diarrhea- there’s
another thing: this word is something that you must be comfortable with in
order to enter into this field at all. And if you’re married to, friends with,
or even just chatting with a veterinary professional, assume this word will
always be brought up when you’re trying to eat your chocolate pudding that
you’ve been looking forward to all day. But back to the hand-washing, this presentation
would not have been complete without the instructional video. This video
featured a three minute, choreographed dance performed by the doctors and staff
of a well-known medical school, demonstrating the technique necessary to
properly disinfect all surfaces on your hands and fingers.
So that
was the first lecture. The first day was capped off by a 3-hour anatomy lab
where multiple people made trips to the first aid kit after suffering scalpel
blade cuts, sometimes self-inflicted, but mostly the doing of an overzealous
lab partner who just couldn’t wait to start dissecting. With a class of about
80% women, the chorus of “Ewww”s is endless for the first couple weeks of lab.
I personally was paired with two girls who could barely stand watching me make
the first incisions (and these people may one day be spaying your dog, let’s
hope they’re able to wield a scalpel by then). Anatomy lab is the definitive
experience of first year, or at least the definitive smell. In second semester
the course schedulers had a cruel sense of humor and placed Anatomy lab before
lunch instead of at the end of the day when we can all go straight home and
shower. Now we were all forced to continue on with our day after lab, sitting
in class while the stench of formaldehyde in our own hair cast an inescapable
cloud we must suffer in while listening to lectures about the parasites we
might get if we don’t wash our hands. Eventually you stop being affected by
anatomy lab, and as it’s the last class before lunch, hunger will override all
other feelings. You find that you are fully capable of sitting at a table
holding the disarticulated limb of a cow, and talking about the roast beef
sandwich you packed and are so excited to eat for lunch.
Now,
you may be thinking that vet school doesn’t sound all that bad. However, if you
enjoy an income, a regular sleep schedule, and reading anything besides a
textbook, you may not be cut out for it. In one semester I had 21 total exams,
and 8 of those took place over the course of just 14 days. It’s not the most
conducive environment for sleep. And when you do finally sleep, you find that
you will actually quiz yourself in your dreams about the functions and
locations of the cranial nerves, the 12 unique nerves that originate directly
from the brain. As a side note, these are pretty
important. Because of this common phenomenon, known as “dream-time
quizmaster” by one of my classmates, you will find that many students sleep
with their notes right next to their bed, if not in bed with them. While this
can commonly be because we often fall asleep studying, it is mostly so that if
you wake up not knowing which reflexes the Glossopharyngeal nerve controls, you
can quickly flip to that page in your notes and return to sleep, satisfied that
you had the right answer. For many topics, you may even find that mnemonic
devices are the only way to go. I would love to share some, but as you often
make them up in a state of frustration when you can’t think of a way to
remember all the arteries that supply blood to the canine forelimb, I don’t
know any that don’t include curse words or other inappropriate references.
While
in vet school, it is important to remember that it was not your pets’ choice
for you to enter into this program. This means that when you learn about cool
stuff, you should not rush right off to try it on your own animals. For
example, we learn about a reflex, governed by one of those oh-so-important
cranial nerves, that animals possess where you can alter their heart rate and
blood pressure by applying pressure on their eyes. You may think this is really
cool, but trust me, when you get home at the end of a long day of classes, your
cat just wants to cuddle, not have its eyeballs compressed. And your friends
without pets will want to come over to practice holding a cat for a blood draw.
Luckily, my pets were with me through my learning to be a veterinary
technician, so they are quite used to this. What they are not used to is being
cast like a cow. Since most of us did not have cows readily available to
practice this skill on, we instead practiced on our cats and dogs. Casting is
when you use a single rope looped in a specific configuration around a cow’s
body to make them lie down so that you can examine them or do anything else
that requires them to be lying down. It’s actually a kind of a cool life-skill
to have, you know, being able to take one rope and know that you could
strategically use it to make a 1,500-pound animal lie down. Kind of makes you
feel like a rock star. This feeling is short-lived, though, because you quickly
remember that you’re only in first year, and that’s really the only cool thing
you’ve been taught to do so far.
If you
do have your own pets while in vet school, appreciate
them. These are some of the few live animals you will work with for your
first two years of school. Becoming a person licensed to treat animals requires
a lot of time learning about them. . . in a classroom. That may sound like an
obvious statement, but there is a common misconception that veterinary school
is four years of playing with animals. You even reach points of desperation
where you will volunteer to pull
all-nighters in a zero degree barn with noisy sheep just on the off chance that
you can be there to help with the birth of some irresistibly adorable lambs.
While I was lucky and personally took part in the birth of more than 20 lambs
over the course of 4 long, cold, winter nights, many people pulled these
all-nighters and all they left with in the morning was fatigue and reduced
feeling in their fingers and toes. If you want work done with animals and you
don’t want to pay, just call a first-year vet student. We’re all desperate for
animal contact.
So,
what gets you through? On some long, sleepless nights you may forget why
exactly you’re putting yourself through all of this, but you’ll always return
to your sanity after a shower and some food. Like many others, I have wanted to
do this since I was old enough to realize what a veterinarian was. There was
that moment around age five when it clicked- there are actually professions for
people that love puppies, kittens, foals, calves, and lambs, and want to help
them feel better and stay healthy. So, during first year you may smell like
formaldehyde half the time and be deprived of animal interaction and restful
sleep, but you keep powering through. You persevere because, while right now
they’re only really teaching you what goes wrong with animals, if you tough it
out and study hard enough, you’ll make it to the next years of school where
they teach you how treat a lot of these abnormalities. So that’s why I suffer
through the exhaustion and delirium, because I’m getting to learn how to help
animals, and that’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do.
