Semester 7, Week 1--The Light at the End of the Tunnel!

Hope the new year has started off well for all you faithful readers. Mine's been... busy to say the least (so my apologies for not telling you all that I passed 6th semester with flying colors). And, besides, I need a vacation to recover from the last week of vacation. I worked as an orientation leader for the incoming class, so I had to help the new class get settled in down here. It was a LOT of running around. Mornings started at 6:30am and I didn't get to bed most days until 11:30pm or 12:00am! Visited the airport at least 8 or 9 times over the course of the first 4 days due to the various flights my group came in over. They had grouped the on-campus students by the days they arrived and the off-campus students by the area, so we off-campus OLs had a lot more running around than the rest. We took them to dinners, on tours of the island, on shopping trips, to their lectures... it was never just a quiet day for any of us. I'm sure they're just as tired as I am!

Classes started Monday and it's already somewhat intimidating. There's a lot of "you do this, and you fail," or "you forget this, and you fail," sort of talk. It's scary, even though it's very rare to hear of anyone failing a class in seventh semester. We also got to put in our preferences for our rotations for this year, and my top 5 are dentistry, surgery, acupuncture, diagnostic imaging (x-rays and ultrasound), and advanced clinics (so more patients and cases). We'll get those assignments for sure on Friday this week.

We also had our meeting regarding clinical placements today and will get to submit our 3 choices later this week. We'll have an answer by next Friday. Having repeated two terms, I'm limited to four choices--Louisiana State University, University of Illinois, Purdue University, and Oklahoma State University. I'm hoping for one of the first three I l listed--I'm used to hurricanes and snow, and don't really want to have to get used to tornadoes as well. :P Besides, Illinois has a great exotics and wildlife program that I would be interested in. But, we'll see where the next chapter of my life takes me in a little over a week!

Happy holidays, everyone and see you over the course of 7th semester!

Semester 6, Finals Week--Commence Panic!

So... it's hard to believe that this semester is already over!  With the ROSSie and block exams, it's just been one thing after another... I've barely had much time to myself (so I somewhat fear what next semester will be like).

Anyway--on to finals week!  It's only 3 this time:
*  Monday:  Small Animal Medicine II at 10:30am
* Tuesday:  Large Animal Medicine I at 10:30am
* Wednesday:  Small Animal Surgery at 10:30am

http://vetschoolparadise.tumblr.com/post/37496133055/trying-to-study-for-that-last-final 
Anyway, I will be staying here over the winter break and being an Orientation Leader for the last week of break, so I'm sure I will have plenty to update you guys on.

Don't be stingy with the good lucks!  I need it!

Semester 6, Week 10--ROSSie Freakout Time!

Well, it's that time of the semester for me--the dreaded ROSSie exam... it's a spay model that we have to perform the procedure on to pass the surgery lab in 6th semester.  So, that includes everything from draping and prepping to the removal of the "uterus" and closure of the "patient."

It's almost 2 years in the works--covering all the surgical skills we've gone through since the very first semester we were down here.

Mine's on Tuesday... keeping the fingers crossed.  :(  Although, I've already started a cleaning spree to keep my mind off of it...

Semester 6, Week 7--The Eye of the (Tropical) StormS

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I love when I can get a good pun in like that.  :P

I had gone down the street to check
on Jesse's dog in the middle of the
storm... got DRENCHED!

Studying by candlelight and the light of the laptop...
or at least attempting to!

Tropical Storm (Hurricane?  I don't know.. there was a lot of confusion with that amongst the student body apparently) Rafael crept over the island on Friday, pretty much at the start of volleyball.  Yeah, we were playing in the midst of some pretty heavy winds... but, I must admit, it adds a certain level of fun to the game when the wind knocks the ball out of the trajectory you had originally planned for it to travel along.  By the end of that evening, the rain began.  Nothing out of the normal for a rain storm out here, however.  Saturday was full of torrential rain and wind.  Then, the SIREN (emergency network through the school) messages started via text messages--"Flash Flood Warning!" "Remain off the roads!" and so on.  I swear some people take that as a challenge sometimes.  :P  My roommates both took that as their indication to flee West Farm--Jackie went to school and Dan trekked his way to Frigate Bay.  Well, there's a ghaut in the road about a block and a half from our house that floods with heavy rain.  Jackie, although worried with the rushing water, has a SUV, so she blew through it with no issue, minus the fear of being washed away.  Dan, who left a few hours later (once we lost power), just walked through it to get to campus and told me later that the water nearly washed him off the edge of the road, partly from the sheer force of the water, and partly from the rocks coming down the ghaut.  I elected to stay home with Lia and Reese (and Jackie's cats) despite the power outage.  It wasn't so bad--my laptop had 5-6 hours of battery power, and my Kindle had enough so I could read 3 books (two of which were for the Practice Management and Jurisprudence class).  I went to bed relatively early, once all my devices lost their battery power.

This is from a road looking towards the ocean... the two vans
are pushed along a bridge while they got caught in a flash flood.
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Woke up Sunday morning with no power yet.  It was nearly 15 hours before it finally came back.  (Although I must say that my house cleaned up fairly quickly, cause I was so bored.)  I took advantage of the power--washed all the towels that I had used to soak up water coming in through the porch door, took a warm shower (which was also quite difficult due to the low water pressure coming through the water main), etc.  Dan and Jackie came home for a bit... or at least until the power went out again.  In that interim, Jackie and I took her computer apart--her heatsink had fried the motherboard... things far beyond my capabilities in basic computer repair/maintenance.  Once the power went out later that evening, everyone went their own separate ways again--Dan went to Frigate Bay again (until the power came back later that evening) and Jackie went to work an ER shift at the school clinic.  As before, I sat at home with the animals and kept myself entertained and busy... and at least attempted to study for a little bit.

This is from the main portion of downtown, just on the
way to Port Zante.
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Monday was interesting--we got even more of those SIREN messages... including a wake-up phone call around 6:30 telling us that classes were still on.  So, we all went to class.  Crossing that ghaut was pretty terrifying--there were rocks the size of grapefruits coming down the 2-foot-deep river.  There were torrential rains all through class... we lost power multiple times (luckily the school has a generator), and, as an old friend from my Pine Banks days said:  "I love the ominous sounds of thunder while the professor is lecturing.  It's like a horror movie."  It's never a dull moment here.  By 12:30, we were sitting in Grand Rounds (7th semester presentations) when everyone's cell phones went off again.  Another SIREN message.  Campus was being closed at 1:00.  *sigh*  So, when the last group finished up, well, Kevin said it best:  "THIS IS NOT A SAFE PLACE (even though it should be one for students).  FLEE, FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES (all at the same time."  It was a mad dash to get off campus... and I'll admit, I was really worried I wouldn't get home with how urgent the messages sounded.  The ghaut was really no different... if anything, it was better since the rains had been letting up over the course of the day.  It was actually so clear on this side of the island that Bonnie, Karim, and I went grocery shopping... despite the half-flooded roads.  :P  Jen, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky--she lives on a dirt road, which had significant chunks of it washed away.  Well, the power was out by the time I got home again, but it came back relatively fast this time... so spent the afternoon studying.  Jackie came home not long after I did after I did my food shopping and took a nap for a bit (can't blame her after being on the overnight in the ER), but when she woke up... we pretty much lost power again.  We Ross students are pretty good at adapting--we invited Jesse, one of Jackie's classmates who lives a few houses down from us--to come by for tea and some Uno by candlelight, which also then included some Epidemiology quizzing since they have a test today.  On a random side-note, it's VERY difficult to tell the blue and green cards apart by candlelight.)

Life is pretty much back to normal now, although the National Hurricane Center is watching the development of another storm brewing out in the Atlantic.  On a good note, despite all the cars that got washed away and accidents and mess, I haven't heard of any deaths from the storm... so that's always a good thing.  We're all looking forward to the weekend--not only does it already feel like it's Thursday, but it's also midsemester break, so we'll have Monday off!  For me, this is a busy weekend if the weather cooperates--dinner for Bonnie's birthday, the Extra-Life 2012 Gaming Marathon, a paintball game, our usual bi-weekly gaming session, my birthday, and we might be squeezing in a birthday dinner for Heather as well.  Phew!  Somewhere in all that, I also need to study and would like to run through the ROSSie procedure again.

We had our second set of block exams last week--and boy were they tough compared to the first set.  Our Large Animal Medicine I and Small Animal Medicine II test averages dropped slightly, but were still around the 80% mark.  Small Animal Surgery, however, dropped by over 10%... and we had an 82% on the first block.  That means the class average was under 72%... just barely passing (as our pass grade is 70%).  I'm at least in a comfortable spot taking these figures into account!  Can't give up though--set #3 is coming up faster than we all would like (can't believe we're at midsemester already!)

Well, hope you enjoyed the update--but I must head back to studying.  I'm planning on using a blog post here on Saturday to update my donators on my Extra-Life marathon, so if you don't want gaming updates, you're welcome to check back in a week.  :P

Semester 6, Week 3--Where Has the Time Gone?!

What was the last time I updated everyone on the goings-on down here?  Almost a month and a half or two months ago sound about right?  Sheesh.  I need to get better at that!

So, I passed 5th semester with flying colors and managed to pull my GPA up overall yet a little bit more--which now leaves me with 4 choices when it comes to choosing a clinical year:

• Oklahoma State University
• Louisiana State University
• Purdue University
• University of Illinois

Out of these, OSU is at the lowest of my list at the moment, but my GPA is high enough that I'm not excluded from any of these.  :)  More will come of this as time passes, I'm sure.

I went back to Boston for the break between semesters this time and spent some time traveling out to Ohio to visit some old friends, going to King Richard's Faire, going shopping at a REAL grocery store (Stop and Shop almost felt like a Target or Walmart to me!), and just getting my fill of the 'real life' back in America.

Two weeks passed far too quickly for everything that I had wanted to get done... but semester 6 started with a... rather eventful start.  Labs.  Oh, boy, do they bog you down with labs.  In the three weeks (and a few days), I've already had my ROSSie practice (a fake spay that we do on a sweatshirt model) twice, a lab to practice drain placements for surgical wounds, a bandaging lab, and asepsis practice.  And that's in addition to the 3-4 lectures per day. 

As for classes, the majority of them aren't too bad--Small Animal Medicine II, Large Animal Medicine I, Practice Management & Jurisprudence, and Small Animal Surgery.  With the exception of Large Animal Medicine I, the classes are interesting and I finally feel as though the last 2 1/2 years are making sense and fitting into place.  Horses... well, they break ALL the rules... quite literally.  

This semester, they introduce a new method of testing--the dreaded block exams.  Honestly, I didn't think it was too bad.  You're given an hour and a half to take 3 exams of about 20 questions each.  Yes, I ran close to time, but I didn't think it was any more difficult to study for them or anything like that.  At least it's 3 classes worth of tests... and not 4 anymore.  We only have 3 final exams this term too, so that's a plus!

Well, I think it's time to stop procrastinating for the evening.  See you next time.