Home for the holidays!

So, to be mean, the university decided to throw two weeks of lectures at us right before Christmas vacation. How rude! These past couple of weeks have been difficult, all anyone wants to do right now is go home for break and forget about school for a bit. Especially after the last exam! Myself along with quite a bit of other students did not do as well as we had thought. The average on this exam was low. Oh well, just gotta get back up and do better on the next exam. You see, these exams are all called MODULES, which factor into one final exam grade. As long as all of these exams add to give a passing grade, you are fine. The next exam is worth 40% of the total grade, so it will bring up the grade quite a bit if you do well. Hopefully it won't be as difficult as the last exam. This exam will be composed of more interesting things such as the urinary system, cardiopulmonary system, endocrinology (which is very interesting to me) and neuroanatomy (hopefully won't be too difficult).

I am working on Endocrinology right now and making notes for the exam in April. I know, a bit early, but I figured that I might as well get a head start and know the information sooner rather than later.

So there is a small closet in my room that houses the water tank and whenever someone uses the water, it sounds like I have a running waterfall in my room (think of it as a built-in ambiance waterfall sound effect). Well, apparently there was a leak and repairmen had to come out and fix the tank. However, in order to get to it, they had to cut the wall open. So now the waterfall noise is amplified 5 times what it was! Rather than a small gurgling stream, it now sounds like the Niagra Falls are in my room! nice for ambiance noise, but distracting when you are trying to study! Well, looking forward to coming home for Christmas. Apparently I will be missing the British Airways strike by a few days. Good thing for that! If I would have scheduled my ticket for during the strike time, I would not have been able to come home for Christmas! Thank god for that! Well, I should be on my way and continue studying. Hope everyone is doing well and I can't wait to see you all! Look out Egg Nog, Sushi, Yardhouse and Corned Beef, here I come!!! (In case your wondering, those things do not exist here. Well, I stand corrected, sushi and corned beef do exist here but the sushi is horrible here and the corned beef only comes in a can, no fresh stuff).

A day at the exotic animal shelter...

So, after two weeks off from classes, we started Endocrinology yesterday and will be going over a lot of other areas of the animal body in the coming months. Exams are over and now we have a lot of new material and a lot of animal handling practicals. Yesterday we had a clinical skills practical in which we learned about performing a physical exam on a dog. We had "Copper" as our patient and he was a border collie that was a tad bit nervous. Ok, physical exam stuff was very easy, I pretty much knew everything Dr. Hudson was talking about but at least I got to play with a dog! Today we had classes and then at 2.30 we had to go to the exotic shelter. We were split up into two separate groups (one group with small mammals and one group with reptiles). We had reptiles first and was glad at that because apparently there is a higher chance of being bitten by the snakes after handling the small mammals. So, we got to play with reptiles for about an hour. A corn snake was the first reptile we got to play with. It was a really nice snake that had a cool copper color to the scales. One person in our group was absolutely petrified of snakes and she had the look like she had seen a ghost when it first came out. In the end, she touched it for a second, but ran back to her seat and had to take deep breaths. I felt bad, she had a serious phobia of reptiles (herpetophobia to be exact). The next reptile to come out was a tortoise, then a large fat-tailed gecko and finally a bearded dragon (which was really cool). We then rotated to the small mammals and got to play with a rabbit, hamster, chinchilla (I had never seen one before and it was really cool looking), a rat and a guinea pig. We had to demonstrate basic restraint of each. Was very simple and we will be tested on restraint techniques in April. Have an early day tomorrow and get out around 1pm. Will be going to a Christmas party around 7pm and then off to a movie with Kristen before she heads back home for Christmas on Thursday. I am looking forward to coming home soon and the nicer weather as well! Hope everyone is doing well and can't wait to see you all!

Finished with exams!!!

So, I finished the last exam yesterday. Yesterday was the short-answer portion of the exam and was somewhat easy to me. I sat down and looked at the questions and knew the answer to each question fairly well. There were a couple that stumped me like explaining what bacterial LPS was, I put down a little information on it and then some other info as filler to make my answer sound better. All in all, I was happy with the essays and short answers but the multiple choice portion was a little more difficult. Should find out grades before I come home in a couple of weeks. Lectures start Monday again. I went to the Christmas market today to take some pictures so everyone can see them, I have not uploaded them to my computer yet from the camera, I will get to that eventually. Also went walking around city centre today in search of some Christmas shops to do some Christmas shopping. I also made three loaves of banana bread today that turned out amazing! Made one loaf for the landlord, one for Kristen and her flatmates and then one for me! I am meeting Kristen tomorrow afternoon and we are going to a pub called "Sheep Heid Pub" that is supposedly Edinburgh's oldest pub. Mary Queen of Scots apparently stopped at this pub quite often and Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott apparently went to this pub as well and wrote a lot of literature there. Anyway, should be fun. Also going to the Christmas market again this weekend and will get some mulled wine and fresh German bratwurst. Well, am going to stop writing and make some phone calls and eat this yummy apple sitting in front of me...

First two days of exams OVER! One more day left!

So, yesterday was the 60 multiple choice question computer-based exam. I'm not sure how I did, I don't think I did horrible, but I don't think I did great. There was a lot of histological questions and we had only one lecture on histology and a lot of the images used no one had ever seen in any of the lectures. Was quite frustrating on that part. The parasitology questions were somewhat easy and there was also a lot of immunology questions which weren't too bad. Today was the essay portion of the exam and was two hours long. We had 7 questions to choose from and only had to write up 4 of our choice. I felt very comfortable with the questions I chose and with the answers I had written. I was the second person done with a half-hour to spare. Tomorrow is the short answer portion and hopefully won't be too difficult. I am going to watch a couple of movies right now and relax and then do some revision later tonight. I am so tired of revising! I'm hoping I retain all of this wonderful information because I am going to use it every day in practice, right? I mean, come on, don't you guys talk to clients about the delayed/immediate pathways of neutrophil migration every day? Well, hope everyone is having a great week and I look forward to coming home and seeing everyone soon!