Vet Student at Košice

Vet school is rapidly coming to an end for me, as of writing this, I only have 101 days until I graduate!  2024 started quite early - in January we had two weeks of lectures in the subject "Professional Communication", which was aimed mostly at helping students prepared for their thesis defence, and a little about job interviews. Long time readers will know that I defended my thesis a year early , so the lectures weren't super useful to me. They were spaced out enough that I was able to go home for a few days which was nice, because there wasn't time during the horse block! Onto that - in order of difficulty, I would rank the states from hardest to "easiest" as smalls, horses, ruminants and lastly pigs. In terms of hours, the horses schedule is probably the most intense, with 2 weeks of clinic hours and 3 weeks of lectures, leaving 2 weeks of free time to study. The lectures were mostly interesting, although we did have a few repeats and one of our professor

The last 7 weeks have been ... insane.  I started my last year with diseases of pigs, which was a very relaxed way to begin - one might say too relaxing.  Going from a very slow study schedule, only having 50 questions to learn, to having 166 was a bit intense. The schedule for the smalls rotation was much busier too - we had 11 days in the clinic, including a night shift (which thankfully for me was very chill), and you could sort of study but it was the first time we'd seen each other for a few weeks so we did spend a lot of time chatting. I've had the privilege of seeing quite a lot of surgery at my previous job and at my clinical placements, so when the opportunity arose to assist in surgeries, I let my colleagues with less experience take part. The surgery suite at the small animal clinic is actually fantastic, they refurbished fairly recently, and it's incredibly high tech. The only bit I disliked about the clinic was how the animals are treated - not badly necessaril

My last birthday during vet school! Rob flew out on Friday and left on Monday, and even though it was a short time, we still had a lovely weekend. Friday was a typical half-day, we watched part of Cruella (just couldn't bring ourselves to finish it!) and eating. This was the set up for the surgeries!     On Saturday, Nicole and I were up at 6:30am to go to a Romani village called Ostrovany to spay some dogs. A vet that graduated last year organised a spay campaign with a local shelter, who captured the dogs for us. There were 3 vets doing the surgeries, and 11 students helping out. 2 of the students were 5th year Slovak students who were collecting blood and rectal swab samples for their diploma thesis. In total, 11 dogs were spayed, 1 cat spay and 1 cat neuter. It was a pretty hectic start - one vet had never done a spay before today (!) so we were supposed to only anaesthetise 2 dogs so one vet could do one, and he could watch the other vet, but people were a bit gung-ho, and 3

Everybody says "spaying and neutering aren't day one competencies", however, I do like to be prepared - so I booked a week at a spay and neuter clinic in Spain. The clinic is run by a very nice man, Wayne, who retired to Spain 20 years ago. Not one to settle down, and concious of the many lost and stray animals around Spain, he set up the neuter clinic to help learning and newly graduated vets to improve their surgical skills. We also get to practice putting in catheters and intubating animals, which is a good skill to have too. This was another thing that I sorted out about a year ago, when I was still a bit unsure if I really liked surgery or not. I've watched a lot of surgeries, I'm not squicked by the blood or anything, but as time has gone on, I realised that I much prefer the medical side of things. However, it wasn't cheap to visit, and I'm going to have to do surgery at some point, so I might as well learn in a relatively controlled environment.  O

Even though I know I get terribly homesick, I keep booking placements really far away from home. This time, I'm in the midlands.  My first day was a little slow - there were 3 inpatients, a chameleon, a ferret and a pigeon. The chameleon needed a partial tail amputation that took all of 5 minutes, the ferret had an ultrasound revealing a very advanced (likely) cancerous process, and was sent home on steroids. That was a particularly interesting ultrasound because he also had a very abnormal kidney - so abnormal that to begin with the vet thought it was the gallbladder. The pigeon is an racing pigeon who had become lost a year ago, but was caught by a cat that pulled some of his primary feathers out so he couldn't fly. This is apparently quite a common occurrence here, and one of the vets has a colony of released ex-racing pigeons living nearby.  I followed some consults - several rabbits, guinea pigs, a hamster, a gerbil and a tortoise. The sad thing about exotic animals is tha

I had my first state exam today - Contagious Diseases. When I tell you I was dreading this, that does not even cover it.  I studied so much for this exam. I don't particularly like thinking about contagious diseases, as I'm a bit of a hypochondriac. I was doing minimum 6 hours a day reading, doing ankis, watching videos, talking about the diseases. Any possible way to study for this exam, I was doing it.  There are 39 questions about various bacterial, viral and parasitic diseases. Most of the questions are ok, diseases that I know about and don't mind. But there were a few questions that I really, really, really did not want. In particular the question about hemorrhagic fevers. Guess which question I pulled?  To make things worse, the professor on the panel studies hemorrhagic fevers, and is a bit of an expert in the area. I couldn't remember the big disease of veterinary importance (Rift Valley Fever), and could only remember some stuff about ebola and hanta fever. I

In my first year, I emailed my year tutor asking about our thesis. I had only been studying veterinary medicine for 2 months at the time of emailing him, but I already had a question I wanted to investigate. He emailed back, suggesting a supervisor for me. I didn't get a response until my second year, but my idea was accepted, and I began to work on my thesis.  I wanted to investigate if there was a link between the colour of a cats' fur and the incidence of Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disorders (FLUTD). This topic is of particular importance to me, as two of my cats have suffered from FLUTD.  I will be honest, I didn't work too much on my thesis for the first year. A little bit of literature review, a bit of thinking about how to design my study. I was very preoccupied at the time studying for the 3P's (Pharmacology, Propedeutics, and Parasitology).  When I started 5th year, I knew things had to get serious. I needed to start collecting my data, but my literature review