State 5 of 6: Diseases of Horses

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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 professors loves to go off topic and chat about other things. 

The clinic hours were pretty calm, while I was there, there were no emergencies or surgeries so we'd just come in each day and check the TPR, groom and walk the horses, and occasionally give some medications. It would have been cool to get see a horse surgery, but it doesn't always work out like that.

The horse state only (only!) has 75 questions to study, split into 3 sections, Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Surgery & Orthopedics, and Internal Diseases. As things go, studying for this exam wasn't terrible. I had a nice base knowledge from smalls, but unfortunately there are many things in horses that are different and frustrating. The night before, I was feeling particularly pessimistic because there are still many things I don't understand about horses (such as the stay apparatus, what a mess), but I was lucky enough not to pull a question about bones or tendons, and did quite well! 

I don't particularly want to work with horses in the future, they make me quite uncomfortable as I've not spent much time around them really, so I'm glad I don't ever really have to think about them again! 

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