Not the canned meat.  I think that stuff is awesome…

There used to be a Yahoo Group called ‘rossfuturevetstudents’ or something similar but it was recently shut down and deleted because the person couldn’t keep up with tracking down and removing the spammers.  I went there often to search posts from people throughout the years getting ready to go to Ross and now it’s all goonnnneeee.

Made a little progress last night – I ordered my dissection kit (#9100), stethoscope and exam gloves from Steeles.com.  This is a significantly cheaper route, thanks to some suggestions from the orientation leaders — Thank God for Facebook, at least I have another resourceful forum left.  I also got a #4 scalpel handle, #10 and #21 blades from Sciencestuff.com.  I can’t wait for my stethoscope to get here… that, to me, is probably one of the first tangible things that make this whole thing real.

I still need to figure out what all I’m going to be able to bring in my luggage… when I was packing for the Doberman Nationals, which was a little over a week, I took seven pairs of shoes.  They had their own bag.  They were all different kinds of shoes so it’s not like I was being excessive about just needing different color options…  My other dilemma is what shoes I want to sacrifice for labs since they are basically going to be saturated in guts and formalin.  The rubber boots are just going to take too much space in my bags and since I’m told we won’t need them until 2nd semester I was thinking no-holed Crocs?  I just don’t like the idea of nasties getting inside my shoes and onto my feet.  When I was working as a surgery technician, I would get called in for these nasty colic surgeries where the surgeons and students would shift stuff and liquid nasty came overflowing out of the surgical field and onto, into their shoes…  a lot of the liquid was from the students keeping the bowel and organs moist, but still.  It was oily with fatty giblets or glops of blood.  One of the residents told me that they’d rather have it in their Crocs on their bare feet rather than in sneakers and socks so that when it’s over you can at least rinse yourself clean.  I guess.  I love the blood and guts of it all, I just don’t like crap in my shoes or on my feet that aren’t supposed to be there.

That reminds me… (another reminiscent colic story)… I pulled the short straw for being on-call during the Christmas holidays last year and ended up getting called in about 40 hours over the entire break.  After getting called in a bunch already and my dog being run into the hospital for an almost bloat — he ended up being set up in my apartment with an IV catheter, fluids and needing drugs every so many hours but I digress — there I am back at the hospital doing another colic, tired out of my mind and practically to the point of hysteria, helping with an enterotomy.  For those who don’t know… I was the person who holds the hose while it’s being shoved into the horse’s intestines so that liquid-y poo flows back out in front of me into a bucket that catches the solid and drains the liquid out into another drain out in the hallway via an attached hose at the bottom of said bucket.  Anyway… so the poo was rather dense despite all the water so naturally it clogged the bucket… on the verge of overflowing… so I say to the clinician, “Ummmm, this is going to overflow soon” and I can’t remember her exact response but it basically sounded like she wanted me to shove my hand in that and stir it around to get the shit going again.  No matter how much I want to be a veterinary, I am not going to voluntarily shove my arm in a vat of liquified poop and STIR.  So, I let it overflow.  And then a chunk of probably more poo came-a-flying down the colon tray and what followed a kerplunk ended up on my face.  Little splats, not one big one, FYI.  The anesthesia tech I was on-call the whole time with almost died laughing, on the inside… I could see it in her face and since we were both on the same insanity level at the time, I almost died with her.

Good times.  They inspire me to go out there and become the vet that I’m supposed to be, lol.