I Have Opinions About Some Books

 I haven't owned a TV since I left Saudi Arabia in 2013. I do enjoy the occasional Netflix movie or series which I watch on an iPad, but for the most part, I consume my news and entertainment by reading them, not passively viewing them.

I've always been a reader. The spiffy certificates with the gold seal sticker that they awarded for summer reading contests at the elementary school library were nice but I hardly needed any encouragement.

During vet school, I didn't read much of anything that wasn't directly related to vet med. Now that I'm free to read what I want, you'd think I'd have (virtual) stacks of books lined up, waiting to be read. (I switched to electronic books almost a decade ago.) Sadly, that's not the case. I might spend a couple of hours browsing the local library's online selection to maybe find three or four books that I might want to read. I say "might" because one of the things I've learned over the years is that I am absolutely free to stop reading a book that I don't like. I don't need a good or logical reason. My time is precious and I won't waste it reading a story when I don't care how it ends. 

An author I've avoided for years is Joyce Carol Oates. She is a prolific writer with dozens of novels and other written forms under her name and two pseudonyms. But I find her writing style by turns bloated and dry, and frankly repetitive. Her stories have never sung to me. But I recently got a copy of Blonde, which she wrote in 2000. It's not a straight up biography of Marilyn Monroe but instead an introspective exploration of known, historical events. In Blonde, JCO's prose is more bloated than usual. But that feverish, dream-like prose creates an anguished tone that is the perfect setting for those known, historical events, the tragedy that was Marilyn Monroe, the actress and the person. It's still a slog, JCO will not ever let the reader off easy, but I can't stop reading it. I won't be rushing out to pick up more of her books but I am really enjoying this one. 

In contrast, I was waiting for the release of Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters with considerable anticipation. In fact, I put in a request that the local library acquire it, and they did. I had already read a couple of reviews of the book and heard an interview with the author and I was excited to finally get to read it for myself. And I was so disappointed when I had to stop reading it about one-third of the way through. 

The book is ... not good. It is told in chapters alternating between current events in the book, which are roughly today, and flashbacks to past events. There are two and a half main characters (yeah, that's one of the problems). One is a transwoman, another is a man who was a transwoman and the lesbian lover of the first transwoman who decided to transition back to presenting as a man but who still views himself as a transwoman inside, and the half is a ciswoman with whom the man has an affair and who gets pregnant. There, all clear, right? I actually don't have problems with this. It could be the set up to some great tragicomedy, if we are able to work through only having half a character as one of the main actors.

Prose in the chapters of the book where the the main character is relating stories from her past, about her journey to become who she is now, about her lovers, and her self-love, that prose sparkles and crackles and jumps off the page with wit and pain and love and beauty. Fabulous writing. The stuff the author added to those bits to turn them into a novel? Complete shit. The plot of the novel? Utter shit. So many huge plot holes and clumsy attempts to stitch that crap into one book instead of what this should have been, a collection of short stories. 

 I stopped reading when the half-character, the ciswoman, tells her lover, the former transwoman, that her mother (hang in there, I know it's bad) said she should communally raise the baby with the transwoman, the lover who is a man but still views himself as a transwoman, and herself because babies "need all the moms" when in fact the very backstory of the half-character ciswoman made it clear she was raised in virtual rural isolation (on a mink farm, wtf?) with a barely attentive mother. Where did all this crap about "all the moms" come from? It was so completely out of character for an already barely limned character that I just threw up my hands and said, this is fucking stupid and poorly conceived. I couldn't stand to read another word. 

The author has a lot of promise, and I hope that she gives us a collection of short stories because I would love to read more of that. This ridiculous attempt at a longer narrative? Just stop.

How'd I Do?

 The horse gut is an amazing and complex thing. They have a single stomach like us, although it's only partially glandular like ours. The real magic happens in their cecum and very long colons. They have a right ventral colon, a left dorsal colon, and a right dorsal colon, plus a regular colon called the descending colon. Their cecum is an enormous blind sac located between the small intestines and all of these colons. 

Depending on the particular pathologies involved, it can be kind of difficult to identify the various parts of the horse's gut during a necropsy. The best way is to remove the entire digestive tract from stomach down, cut all of the ligaments (thin sheets of tissue that hold it in a particular shape), and stretch it out. 

Yesterday I had a foal who died from not one but two intestinal ruptures. For accuracy in my report, I wanted to figure out exactly what parts were affected. Because everything in the foal's abdomen had been marinating in intestinal contents and bacteria for a couple of days, there was a lot of autolysis (post-mortem changes). And there was necrosis of various parts of his gut associated with ulcers and hemorrhage that preceded the two ruptures. Tissues were delicate and friable. Everything was coated in bits of partially digested feed and greenish, bloody fluid. 

We of course took pictures but those can be hard to interpret, and sometimes the techs don't get those loaded onto the server for a couple of days. After I had extricated his gut and stretched it out, I made a quick sketch, labeled some key bits, and marked the areas of the ruptures. Here's the result:

 

"Colon" is the descending colon, RDC is the right dorsal colon, PF is the pelvic flexure (a distinctive anatomical feature of the horse gut), "base cecum" is where the cecum opens into the right ventral colon, J is jejunum, D is duodenum, and "stom" is the stomach. That bit sticking off the stomach would be the esophagus. The heavy black bars are the two rupture sites.

Compare this to a diagram from one of my vet school textbooks:

 

I think I produced a real masterpiece!

Notice how I positioned the stomach to the right, descending colon to the left, the same way as in the picture. That's because we necropsy ruminants and horses from a left lateral position, meaning their left sides are down on the table. This creates the same right lateral view of the intestines as shown in the picture. I'm pretty sure I would struggle to identify things if I had to look at them from the left aspect. 

Consistency is important when doing necropsies. If we examine tissues in the same order every time, we are much less likely to miss problems.