The hardest part is getting in . . . yeah right

Today was our first day of palpation labs. The quintessential vet student experience.

What is palpation you ask?

It's a glorified term for when a vet sticks his/her arm up a cow's bung hole and uses the rectum like a glove to feel around inside the cow. Amazingly, you can feel a lot.

Well, theoretically you're supposed to feel a lot but I can't feel sh*t in there right now (har har). You're supposed to palpate with your non dominant hand so that you leave your dominant hand clean to write notes or charts up. I'm right-handed which means I used my left arm to palpate and unfortunately, my non-dominant hand is about as useful as a limp noodle. I'm like a walking human fiddler crab.

"The knuckles are the point of resistance so don't be shy with the lube," said my professor.

The girl beside me giggled nervously and I looked down at my rubber boots and tried to look nonchalant.

"So I want you to get comfortable with the rectum today. BE ONE WITH YOUR COW. You will be palpating her every day for the next month or so, so get acquainted with the wonders of her rectum. You only get ten minutes in there though today cus her rectum hasn't toughened up yet, but it'll get better as you go on."

I donned my special waterproof outfit (all the better to wash the poop off of later) and put on the looooooooong glove. I put on a normal latex glove on top of that one, shoved a giant bottle of lube into my back pocket and trudged off to meet the first rectum of the rest of my life.

Everyone started making comments to me about trying to find the smallest, shortest, cow for me. "That one's tiny Vivian! I'm sure you can reach that one!"

I was a little annoyed. There's nothing I hate more than Vivian-can't-reach-the-cow jokes. "i don't mean to be offensive, but are you sure you can reach over the cow?"

I was offended.

Anyhow, having settled on a cattle beast of moderate size, I stood behind, lubed up, gently rubbed at her rump to let her know I was there, and grasped her tail with my right hand. She mooed, then kept eating and I took that as a sign to continue. I cranked her tail up to expose the vulva and anus, coned my fingers like they'd taught me . . . and went for it.

I got as far as my wrist and got stuck. The cow was clenching like crazy.

"Let the waves of persitalsis pass over you. Try to maintain your ground." shouted my prof.

I felt the ripple of smooth muscle contraction running up my hand. I pushed in deeper and pretty soon, was up to shoulder in the cow. The first step is to clean out the rectum so I began to scoop the poop out in giant handfuls. Unfortunately, you create a sort of negative pressure in there so the rectum tends to suck air into it whenever you take your hand out which leads to some fun times.

On the white board at the end of the barn was written the weeks goals:
-learn how to prevent the rectum from ballooning
-feel the cervix and get a feel for the rectum
-attempt to retract the uterus

After a few minutes, my classmate beside me was freaking out cus his cow's rectum had sucked in a ton of air. One of the definite times when I'm glad I don't have giant biceps that stretch out the sphincter and let in lots of air. Poor guy wasn't so lucky though and as he pulled out and stood back, his cow lifted her tail on her own and let out a giant fart.

"SSSPPLLLLLBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBT *squeak* BBBBLBLLLLLLTTTTTTT"

All was silent for a bit and he went back to start the rectal again but before he could do so, his cow let out another explosive squelch which showered him (and me) with little sprinkles of poop.

Our professor walked by and announced to the class, "And make sure you or one of your classmates checks your face before you go home today cus some of you are gonna be leaving here with freckles you never had before."

Just great.

My cow started getting antsy and in no time flat, she had learned that if she clenches and strains, my limp noodle of an arm gets trapped and I can't move or fidget around inside her. I started shouting profanity as she clenched up tight with her anal sphincter like a tourniquet around my arm. I could feel my arm going numb and I was powerless to move back or forth. I turned to the left and right of me to see if I could ask someone what to do and in the process, smeared poop from my shoulder onto my chin. I was beyond caring at that point.

Another wave of contractions started up and I coned my fingers and let it pass over me.

At least it kept my arm nice and warm.

Another few minutes later, I gave up and let my cow go.

I have a month and a half to spend with her and her anal-retentive ways. My left forearm is sore now and I've been told that I'm goign to be using muscles I've never used before. I'm also forced to trim my nails as short as they can go for the next while so I don't perf the cow's rectum.

Sounds bad, but really, I'm enjoying the labs. Some girls (and the guy beside me) were freaking out about it. "I'm not liking this. Ew!" and I suppose that cow rectums aren't meant for all of us. Really though, it's a great skill to have and it's such a great tool that veterinarians have which doctors don't. Can't just pop on an arm length glove and walk into your patient's room at the hospital and say "bend over and relax. this is gonna stretch a bit. I gotta try and feel your kidney."

In the meantime, aside from these cow labs, I've been uber stressed and busy with other things in my life. I'm trying to apply for an externship in NYC in small animal surgery for next year some time. I'm also trying to fix the stupid Mac computer that belongs to the students in our college. It's been running super slow and driving me crazy cus the delay between a mouse click and what it's supposed to do is about THREE MINUTES (I exaggerate not).

The IT guy for our school wants nothing to do with it cus technically the students association purchased the damned thing and it's the students', not the school's.

Whatever.

I also have a midterm on Monday (I just had one last monday too, bastards are trying to kill me. we just got back from Christmas break!) and next week, I'm leaving to go to PEI for a conference (at least it'll give Bessy's rectum and my left arm a three day holiday).

Instead of studying for my midterm last week, I decided to go on a pubcrawl on friday night. I don't want my mark on my midterm back. I think it's going to hit me harder than the hangover. The pubcrawl was for the conference I attended last week which was run by the national health students integration, cooperation and blah blah blah association. I say blah blah blah cus it was one of those conferences where they drone on to us about how important it is that we all need to work together (vets, MDs, dentists, nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists, OTs, etc. etc.) and how much better the world would be for it and how magically we can achieve world peace and end poverty if we would just work together . . . but they don't tell us how.

Call me jaded but I found the conference more full of sh*t than my palpation lab.

Anyhow , the pubcrawl was to foster "interdisciplinary relations" between the different vet, MD, dent, whatever students from all over Canada (though why they chose to have the national conference in Saskatoon is beyond me) and well, there was lots of interdisciplinary relating going on that night if you know what I mean.

I got ditched by the girl that had asked me to come with her in the first place and she ended up going home with some guy she's had a crush on for ages and left me stranded on the dance floor between an elementary school teacher who was grinding some pharmacy student and a med student from Regina who kept apologising to me and going, "Oh god I'm so drunk! I hope I'm speaking intelligibly still!"

I kept assuring him he was speaking fine, though who was I to judge considering I'd had more drinks than I could count? I swear that the high stress they put us through in our respective programs is turning all of us into alcoholics.

The next morning, I woke up in rough shape at the ungodly hour of 8am and trudged to school to take care of our lab dogs which we use for all our practical labs in third year. I had mistakenly signed up to feed and walk them the day before. The dogs are all "SPCA specials" and were neither spayed nor neutered. Two of the females were in heat and needed to be constantly separated from the male who, goodness knows why, was housed right across from them.

The other thing is that THEY KNOW HOW TO TURN DOOR KNOBS. Don't ask me how, but I let them out of the kennels and left them in the dog run room with the door closed and next thing you know, I had four giant dogs come bursting out of the room and ripping around the med ex ward. It was like roping cattle and I grabbed four leashes and one by one got them back which was no easy feat considering the dogs seemed to reflexivley start struggling and tugging as soon as you got the leach on them.

As I roped the last one, my classmate who had been taking care of them before came into the ward and was like "Oh, I forgot to warn you that the black and brown one likes to chew through her leash and that they all know how to open door knobs."
"Yup. Kinda learned that the hard way!" I shouted as I shoved the four squirming dogs (all trying to pull me in different directions and wrap their leashes around my wobbly legs) back into their kennels and bolted the door shut.

I took the male for a walk and nearly puked on my shoes cus I was so hung over and he kept zig zagging on the sidewalk and dragging me from lamp post and bike rail to fire hydrant to fire hydrant. Then I had to feed the dogs and trust me, the last thing you want to do when you're hung over is mix four big smelly bowls of dog food.

I survived and even managed to vaccinate and deworm two of the dogs. The dogs are solely my class's responsibility and at the end of the year, we're responsible for adopting the dogs out to good homes. The problem is that apparently whoever was feeding them on Monday opened up the kennels to let them run around and went to go do something else. They turned their back for one second and looked back and the male and one of the females that was in heat were going at it.

So now we have four dogs and x number of puppies to adopt out. Our supervising clinicians have discussed doing a surgical abortion on the one bitch so that we don't have to adopt out the puppies. I have to admit that that would make it a hell of a lot easier for all of us, even if it sounds wrong.

In other news, I fell asleep in class today and woke up to a "We have a sleeper in the class! What's your name?"
Oh sh*t.
"Um, Vivian?" I whimpered weakly.
Much laughter ensued. My prof chairs the animal welfare committee that I'm the student rep for so he knew perfectly well who I was.
"Oh, Vivian! Vivian LAU. Well Vivian, can you tell us what the weight of the cow uterus is in pounds?"
I glanced frantically at my sheet and noticed that it was supposed to weigh 9 kg and did the mental math. For the rest of the lecture, my prof kept picking on me. It carried on into palp labs cus I had the same prof in there.
"Well, now that you're well rested, I expect great things from you in here."

Ugh.

The truth is that I'm tired and keep sleeping in class cus I've been so stressed out since I got back. It's been non-stop and I'm ten times more stressed now than I was before Christmas. Unfortunately, my stress has manifested itself as insomnia this time and I've been averaging about 4 hours of restless nightmare-filled sleep a night, which, for a koala like me is NOT sufficient.
This leaves me non-functional in the day so I rely entirely on caffeine which only worsens the insomnia. There was one day last week when I got 3 hours of sleep and drank three cups of coffee, two teas and a coke. I've been weaning myself off but it's a slow process. Due to the snow storm, they shut down all campus buffeterias and I had no coffee today (which is why I fell asleep in class) so I should sleep well tonight but it's 1am now and I'm still wide awake.

Well, better read up on cow uteruses and spinal surgery in dachshunds.

Why didn't I just drop out of high school and become a rockstar? Oo! speaking of which I am going to the Billy Talent concert in a few weeks! I e-mailed my school to see if anyone wanted to come with me and one girl e-mailed me back saying she went to high school with the lead singer of Billy Talent!!! So I e-mailed her back right away with the burning question I'(and I'm sure all you other punks who have listened to "Nothing to Lose" have) which is: DID HE REALLY EAT ALL HIS LUNCHES ALONE IN THE BATHROOM?
haha. But admit it! you want to know too!

And the answer was: NO! he was one of the most popular guys in school and actually dated that girl's best friend. So the EMO thing is all a LIE! A LIE! but I love his music, so really, who am I to judge?

OK. Enough procrastination. So about those uteruses and weiner dogs . . .

Sigh, I should just sleep.