At this point in our second year, we've completed several important foundation course series. For the most part, the "ologies" are done: virology, parasitology, bacteriology. Toxicology this term will complete that group. The first pass through clinical and systemic pathology is completed. Sys path deals with mechanisms of disease in systems like skin, kidney/urinary, liver, etc. Clin path covers many of the standard laboratory analyses, assays, and tests that vets use to diagnose disease: urinalysis, blood chemistry, that sort of thing. We've been introduced to diagnostic imaging, mostly radiography (xrays) but there's much more of that to come next year. We had a couple of brutal terms of pharmacology this year. It is extremely difficult to memorize drug things when we have no real-world contexts for them, but that's where pharm falls in the curriculum and whining won't change that. Up to this point, we've been making and memorizing lots of lists of lots of fiddly bits.
The tenor of our course work made a significant shift this term. This really became apparent Thursday afternoon with the first lab of our principles of surgery course. We all had to show up in scrubs. Divided into small groups, we got tours of parts of the teaching hospital that few of us had been in before. And we had a practical exercise to learn how to put on sterile gloves in a sterile manner, and how to perform a rough sterilization, the one that gets done before the animal is moved into the surgery suite, and how to properly drape a designated surgical field, the area where the surgeon will be making her incision.
We practiced these latter things using rubber legs, possibly meant to represent the leg of a large dog. But these objects had no pelvis, no paw or hoof, no bones, no skin, not even identifiable muscles, just tough orange-colored rubber that was vaguely leg shaped. Getting towel clamps into an object that has no skin was quite difficult.
Even during the tour, which, to be honest, was still a tour and not all that exciting, I could sense the growing excitement in my small group. And when we were in the student teaching lab swabbing down the orange rubber legs, everyone was visibly even more amped up.
The reason was simple. Suddenly, after almost two years of "death by powerpoint" with only token nods now and then to touching real animals, we were actively doing things that we will be doing for the rest of our careers as vets.
In a few weeks, we will be intubating dogs and cats and acting as the anesthesiologist for the fourth-year vet students when they do surgeries. And in six months, we will all be making incisions in real dogs and cats. Six months.
This vet school thing is starting to get very real.
Our entire class simultaneously came to that realization during the Thursday afternoon lab. I talked to many of my classmates on Friday, asking them in different ways what their impressions of the lab were. And they all confirmed that we had indeed experienced a hive-mind event, a collective shift in how we viewed the vet school process, and how we viewed ourselves as soon-to-be vets.
I am not surprised that we had this kind of shared emotional experience. Vet school is based on cohorts of students who take the same classes at the same time for the first three years. We are stressed and challenged together, and see each other succeed and fail close up and in uncomfortable situations. I actually expected this to happen at some point, but even so, I was just as swept up as everyone else on Thursday.
So we move forward, still as a group, but with a much stronger shared sense of purpose.
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