Let's pretend it is veteran's day week...then boards...now hell...

I'm really bad at keeping up on these posts so let's do a bunch at once....

First!
Veteran's day week! yay! well, i guess i'm not really that excited but there was a very cool display out near my house for the whole week...i almost teared up every time i drove by....

So I live near a HUGE cemetery and during that week, the Veteran's for Peace group set up this display along the road in the cemetery that was essentially a mini gravestone for every solider that has died since we entered this god-forsaken "war"

It was called the "memorial mile"


There was a sign between each year and each location (afghanistan and iraq)





Here you can see the graveyard in the back



they even put a little wisconsin flag on every gravestone that was for someone who was from wisconsin that died:(



and it went on all the way down the road for almost a mile




Pretty moving....

Anyway, my next rotation after therio was VACATION....to study:( sounded awesome but it was soooooooo exhausting....i woudl get up early in teh morning, either sit down at my desk or go to the library and try to put in 12 hours of studying a day for boards.

oh yeah--boards. that's why i was torturing myself--but what is boards you ask.

The veterinary boards exam is the big exam all fourth year vet students have to take and pass. it's one (of the many) requirements we need to get our license. this exam is intimidating though....a 6 hour exam of 360 multiple choice questions covering everything we've ever learned (and more). it is a very scary exam.

so after 2 weeks of studying i took it...and i truely feel like i failed...which means i would have to re-take it in teh spring...*sigh* we'll see...i'm not sure anyone feels like they passed, but i only knew 40% of the answers, so i guess we'll see how good of a guesser i am.

oh, i find out if i passed in february...so at least i have a few months of not studying...

so after vacation/studying, boards, I am now on Large Animal Medicine rotation. which is pretty much just hell. i did get to play with a baby goat yesterday, so that was fun. but that's about it. it's very horrible. Why is it hell? torturing animals. i hate it. last wed we had a dairy cow come in "down" (couldn't stand). after some radiographs we saw she had a broken femur (leg bone) and dislocated hip on the other side. Bone pain is extremely painful and a dislocated hip is likewise painful. However, her owners wanted her genetics so they chose to keep her alive for a week with us so they could flush her embryos before euthanizing her (they had bred her the day before she went down)

so this whole last week we had this broken cow in the hospital---just keeping it alive so we could kill it. and she was in horrible pain. We did the best we could to keep her pain to a miminum. We put an epidural catheter in so we could administer pain medication directly to her lumbar spinal cord, gave her NSAIDS, and slung her in a float tank (like a huge bath tub that cows can float in--this cow did love her float tank) but you could tell she was still in pain, and to me it's incredibly unethical to torture an animal for a week so you can get 1 embryo out of her. that's all we got out of her today before we euthanized her. and it will probably not be viable b/c she's been stressed out for a week.

I shouldn't be so judgemental b/c i drink the milk and eat the cheese that comes from dairy cows. i should be vegan.

but anyway, i'll stop my ranting and get on to better things like thanksgiving!! yay!! i get to come home, at least for the day:) back to work on friday.

Here is a nice happy picture of a cute animal so i end on a positive note:)

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_14507.cfm

thank god it's over

Today marks my last day of Therio! yay!

I was on with three good friends of mine so that made it bearable and full of laughs:)

One day, we were at a dairy farm palpating what felt like a billion dairy cows, when this tour group of Algerian business people came walking through the barn. So here I am, armpit deep in cow butt, covered in manure, when a man asks me, "are you inseminating?". I politely answer "No, I'm rectally palpating to determine her stage of cycle". Oh, I can be professional--and you doubted!

These Algerians were constantly shapping pictures and taking video of us. I wonder what newspaper or TV show is showing me in Algeria. We laughed for a good 20 minutes after they left.

oh, but the day got even better!

We went to culver's for lunch where there was a big to-do about them lying to us vegetarians about the meat products in their food. The short version is that the culver's corporation states on their allergen pamphlet that none of their food is certified vegetarian and all may contain trace amounts of animal products. So not only did several employees argue with us that the potato au gratin soup was vegetarian (it's not...it has fish and pork in it) but they shouldn't ever use the word "vegetarian" b/c the corporation has that disclaimer. This was a serious problem for me as a vegetarian and could have been a lot worse--if i was jewish i'd be morally outraged and if i was allergic to fish--i'd be in the hospital!

anyway--i wrote a letter to the culver's corp asking to get it in their training protocol so more serious situations don't arise. i got a letter of apology back so i was satisfied. the funny thing was, in the letter they included gift certificates for free food baskets at culvers......hmmm...i wonder if they even read my letter or maybe they're getting their kicks by giving non-vegetarian food to a vegetarian, "good luck eating this!". haha, whatever.

And finally, this friday we went out to a dairy goat farm to do a herd evaluation which was pretty fun. Essentially we got a tour of the farm and ultra sounded a ton of goats to see who was pregnant. Goats are awesome animals--they are so curious and hearty. The picture at the top is me standing next to a goat in the milking parlor. Goats go up ramps so when they are being milked (from behind) the milker doesn't have to stoop. This picture adequately represents the part of the animal we were concerned with on this rotation, although slightly obscured by the tail;)