Final grades for this quarter have at last been posted--there was some sort of computer snafu that delayed this for several days--and I'm pleased to report that I did very well. I am most pleased that I pulled out a B- in gross anatomy. It was looking kind of grim for me as we headed into the final exam, as in I might, just might, not pass the class. But I didn't give up and really buckled down on the studying. It's not like I wasn't studying before, but I went at it even harder.
Right before the final, I found out that our sheep dissection team got full points for in-lab quizzes. I am eternally grateful to my lab partners for reviewing past material every day before starting new dissections so that I was able to pass those quizzes. And we got full points for our dissection itself. We had the only sheep, so there was a bit of pressure on us to do it well. Both of those things boosted my total points up quite a bit.
Even so, I found it a real challenge to prepare for the final exam. I told my friend McKenna that I have never taken a drug that emptied my mind faster and more completely than walking through that lab door at exam time. She laughed, then said, wait, how many drugs have you done? I said, all of them.
On the second midterm (don't get me started on how stupid that is; there aren't two midpoints to the term), I missed EVERY SINGLE lab exam question about nerves and veins and arteries in the thoracic cavity of large animals (horse, cow, goat, sheep). My consistency was most impressive. I study that material. I draw up charts and diagrams and make lists and repeat them out loud and rewrite them from memory. But as soon as I walk through that door, I forget it all. It's like I never studied it.
But since this has now happened to me many times in succession, I prepared for it. I knew that the instructors graded rather generously, so instead of putting a bullshit answer I knew was wrong, I wrote, for example, "a more distal branch of the femoral artery". While this was not the answer they were looking for in that case, it would be technically correct and get me 0.25 points on a 1-point question. Hey, it's a strategy. Don't judge until you have to learn the fiddly details of the anatomy of ten species on nine months. Anyway, it worked.
That week of finals ended rather anticlimactically, as I knew it would. We were all zombies by the fifth exam--stumbling, bloodshot eyes and rumpled clothes, barely able to talk. It was pathology, a difficult course graded with no mercy by a terse Canadian. Those pathologists, I swear they prefer dead things over the living. Such difficult people to deal with. I swam my way through that exam, well enough prepared that I knew what I did and didn't know. By that point, I was utterly done with this first year.
And so I am in fact done with it. I am now officially a second-year vet student.
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