Vet Student Humor

Upon viewing a slide of a female cow lying on her back, cut open from anus to throat, with the two horribly swollen horns of her uterus pulled out and splayed across the rest of her viscera, the girl who sits next to me in class leaned over and whispered in a very concerned tone, "Do you think she'll be all right?"

The class uses a small whiteboard in our room (all 56 of us are in the same room every day, all day) to post weekly notices accompanied by amusing drawings. Last week it was a drawing of a uterus with a face saying "Hi! I'm Cuterus! Be an ova-achiever!" (Can you guess that we are doing reproduction units in all of our classes?)

One of our classes is gross anatomy. The adjective gross distinguishes the material from micro-anatomy and refers to features than can be seen with the naked eye (grossly visible). The puns on gross are too many to mention. On Monday afternoon, my gross anatomy partner and I were struggling to see some blood vessels and nerves in our cat that happened to coincide with a point where the diaphragm attaches to the inside of the thoracic wall. I made an executive decision to cut the diaphragm at that point. I said, there, that should give us some room to work. And my partner, master of deadpan delivery, said, yes, we cut the breathing room to make some breathing room.

A student group presentation in physiology class on reproductive cycles included a section on hormonal controls of sexual behavior. Before beginning, the student doing that part of the talk held up his phone so we could all hear the opening bars of Marvin Gaye's song "Let's Get It On." The student also happened to put on his first slide a picture he found on awkwardfamilyphotos.com of a young girl sitting on a bench smiling. In the background, a male giraffe is mounting a female giraffe. The student said, oh, wait, it's not about the girl in the photo. Which of course immediately made it all about the girl in the photo.

What do you call a field full of rib cages? Thoracic Park.

We are now nearly finished with the first nine weeks of the first year of vet school. I didn't think I'd survive the five weeks of five major exams but I did. All classes are winding down to final exams, which begin December 7.