Quite a bit has gone down since my last post. My last evaluation for community practice was that if I kept going what I was doing I'd be a great vet and it felt so good to hear that. Community practice ended with a bang... I ended up switching my emergency from Sunday day to Sunday night on the last day of rotation with a student going on preceptor. Everything was going pretty slowly until about 10:30 and everyone and their dog came in, plus a bunch of wildlife exotics which I had to call the zoo/exotics student in for. I didn't end up getting to go home at all and started radiology rotation the next morning with zero hours of sleep so that was fun.
So my first day of radiology I spent the whole morning of orientation trying to stay awake. The sent me home at noon and I couldn't have been more grateful. The rotation was ok. I feel much better about reading and taking rads but it was all self study for the quizzes and then after them the radiologist would kind of round us so that was not so useful. We got to watch a ton of small animal ultrasound and the new radiologist was amazing going over them. I really hope she revamps the rotation for future students.
I had my grand rounds on the last Friday of this rotation. I was super nervous going into it, but it turned out really well.
I'm on diagnostics right now which is a daily mix of clinical pathology in the morning, followed by parasitology until lunch, then gross pathology in the afternoon. It's kinda hard to keep up with everything on this rotation since it's basically like 3 classes every day. The clin path portion we are assigned cases that include bloodwork, blood slides, and urine slides and we answer some questions as well take quizzes on then discuss as a group. It is a great review, but also frustrating at times. Parasitology the first week we just had visual quizzes then went over parasite life cycle and visual review, and then this week has been more case based. Next week we have individual parasite presentations. Mine's over cryptosporidiosis. Gross pathology is where we get sent euthanized or dead animals to dissect and check for lesions and take samples for culture or histopathology or whatever. I really enjoy that part but then we have to write reports and it kinda sucks cause every week we have a new resident that requires different things so it's like a new rotation every week. Only one week left of this"vacation" rotation and then I start small animal internal med. I'm definitely not looking forward to this but I've heard you learn a lot and that's the point of fourth year, right? Well I better get started on my presentation.