Week 9 of 13, Spring Semester

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Monday

Monday is always a brutal day to start the week on - a 7:15 wake up for diagnostic pathology, immediately into diseases of poultry, and finishing the morning with internal diseases of small animals. These lectures are normally very interesting, but my brain doesn't turn on until much later in the day. 

After a short lunch break, I head into uni for my poultry practical. It was a pretty rough one today (they normally are anyway, we do a necropsy of a chicken each week, and if you've smelt chickens and death, you can imagine how bad it smells). We were talking about embryo development and hatching eggs today, then we opened up some eggs - one unfertilised (from Tesco), and 2 that had embryos in them. One of them was already dead, but the other one wasn't yet. It was quite upsetting to see a 15 day old embryo die, especially as some of my classmates were prodding and pulling at it. I know it's "just a chick", and thousands of chicks die every day, but it was still pretty awful. 

12 day old chicken embryo - this one had already died. Sorry it's a bit graphic but it's reality
 

All of the food hygiene lessons here are kind of weird - I know about a lot of it because I'm vegan and have researched it before. I'm not shocked or disgusted by anything, if anything it just makes me sad. It is surprising to me though that even this far into the course, there are people who haven't seen stuff like chicken embryos before.

After that, we had a seminar about detecting lameness in horses - I did listen to it, but I'd just got feedback from my thesis supervisor that I'd formatted my references wrong, so I was picking away at rewriting that during the lecture. When both of those things had finished, we ambled over to our internal class, where we picked up from this morning, talking about seizures and acute neurological cases. Our teacher for neurology is great, he is clearly so knowledgable, but it's so easy to accidentally set him off on a tangent. For example, he might ask, "what drug would you use in this case?", and you'd reply with a drug, and instead of just saying no, he'll say, "not in this case, but when would you use that drug?" and we'll end up talking about some other condition for 20 minutes. He almost always brings dogs to class too which is a bit distracting, as they always want to sit on your lap. 

I haven't submitted my thesis as of writing this (03/04/23), but the deadline is in 9 days and I'm pretty sure everything is in order now. Just waiting for final confirmation from my supervisor. 

I've also signed up for the 65th Student Conference to present a shortened version of my thesis. I'm pretty nervous about it, but I have been eating/ drinking/ sleeping/ breathing FLUTD and coat colours for the last few months, so it'll probably be ok. Waiting for the offical guidelines on how to prepare my article and presentation for that. 

Two of my exams are confirmed to be online this exam period, which is such a relief with 2 state exams looming over me. The other 3 exams that I have in person (preventive vet med, diseases of poultry and breeding and diseases of fish) should be ok too.  I do enjoy the in person exam format here, as I think I do much better when I am able to explain myself, and answer questions, but I can work myself up into a bit of a state (see: fish, last exam period)

Tuesday

We went on a trip to the dog shelter today - they have nearly 300 dogs there! We vaccinated some dogs with the core vaccines (CPV-2, CAV, CDV, leptispirosis and rabies), after a quick clinical examination and a fuss. It was absolutely freezing, icy cold winds that cut to the bone. Normally, we'd do the practical outside, but we had to squeeze all 28 of us into a tiny room. 

One of the cuties at the shelter
I finished a fantastic book on the bus back, 'Educated' by Tara Westover. It's a crazy insight into the world of fundamentalist Mormonism, and this woman's escape from her family's brainwashing. It's not a light read by any means, I had to put it down several times, but Westover sounds like an amazing person. Despite not having a formal education, she goes on to earn her PhD from Cambridge!

When I came home, I had a nap, and played with my foster kitten, before a couple of lectures in the afternoon. 

And then, the most exciting thing, I submitted my thesis! It's been a real piece of work for the last few months, so I'm glad that it's out of my hands now. My defence isn't until the end of May, so I have time to prepare everything, and I'm glad to be doing the Student Conference to practice beforehand. 


Wednesday

Because it's Easter weekend, a few of our lectures were cancelled today, so I had the morning off! I was going to bring the kitten to the vet to get her vaccinations, but she was sick in the morning, so I decided to hold off.

I had a horses lecture, a surgery lecture and then a food hygiene lecture, before a 5 day break! I have no plans other than going to Budapest on Saturday (I'll write a blog post about that), and getting this kitten vaccinated.

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