Almost finished first week!

I cannot believe after tomorrow I will have completed my first week of vet school!  It's been great so far.  The Animal Body lectures are mostly review...cell biology and back into biochemistry...lovely, just lovely.  The material is less than exciting for me, but it is a welcome and needed review.  The great part about our program, is that we get to start handling animals very early...like 3rd week.  This is very unusual compared to US vet schools.  It is not uncommon for them to not touch an animal until 3rd or 4th year!  One of the main reasons I chose this school is because of its animal husbandry requirements.  I have been in the working world for so long and do not have recent clinical or animal husbandry experience, so the emphasis on hands-on animal handling here, suits me very well.  I will do a separate post on this, as it differs greatly from the US schools.

Today was a long day.  I had two lectures and then straight into a 2 hour practical looking at black and white zerox copies of cells (not easy to see everything), with questions on certain structures and their functions. We also spent a good deal of time differentiating between different types of microscopy on the pictures of the slides.  We only had a 30 minute window before we had to head out to Langhill Farm for our afternoon practical.  Another vet student drove me to my flat so I could take my dogs out (in the pouring rain), grab a quick bite and then head to Langhill.

Langhill Farm is our school's farm.  It houses our dairy cows.  It is an actual working farm where they milk and breed the cows.  We need to not only be able to differentiate between all of the breeds of cows, but also be able to handle them (put a halter on, do an exam, etc), know their nutrition requirements and be educated about milk production and quality of milk.  We could learn all of this in lecture, but the clever ones at Dick Vet have found that it's a better learning model to give us an 'adopted cow' with which we get all of the information with regard to their milking and health and follow them for a long period of time.  We are given their specific numbers in terms of quantity of milk and its composition. This will allow us to research what is normal and how our cow compares.  We are also given the records of its health and all of the information regarding any visits by the vet. 

This is my adopted cow.  I'm still thinking of a name for her.  Suggestions are welcome.

And, this is her as a calf.  How cute is she??

So, back to our practical today.  It was on biosecurity, handwashing and clothing washing.  While we didn't get to play with cows, all of this information and techniques are critically important.  Biosecurity is basically ensuring that diseases are not passed from farm to farm, animal to person, person to animal, etc.  The foot and and mouth outbreak really brought light to the importance of biosecurity. 

Our practical was from 2-5pm. We split into groups. One hour was designated for a biosecurity lecture/group project/video, one hour for handwashing technique and one hour for washing of your waterproofs and wellies (waterproof top and bottom and boots).  The handwashing was interesting.  You 'wash' your hands with a lotion that once you put it in a black light box, shows all of areas you missed. They then teach you how to properly wash and you do the exercise over to see how you do. We also put our hands on an agar plate before and after we washed. They are going to grow the cultures and post with pictures all of the nasties that were on our hands.

Learning of the proper washing of the waterproofs and wellies was fun.  We smeared each other with mud, as if we had been out on a call to a farm and had mud, feces, blood and whatever else on our waterproofs.  We were taught how to hose and brush off, then disninfect.  This should be done everytime you leave a farm.  It is so easy to spread really bad stuff from one farm to the next and even from your clothes/hands/boots right back to your home, family and pets. Even the healthy animals carry stuff we can get pretty sick from and it is ever so important for us to remember this. 

I finally got home around 530pm and my Bingos were really happy to see me.  I think that is the longest I have been gone in one day from them..ever.  I could not believe it, but there were no accidents.  So proud.

Ok, it's off to look at my notes from today and check out the 4 lectures for tomorrow.  Oh yeah, and to eat somehing too....

Over-N-Out.