Back to the Grind.

After a seemingly endless travel day (yay for 9 hour layovers in San Juan!), a few days of move-in madness, and a nice relaxing day at the Marriott that ended in a dead-battery car....we are all ready to tackle 2nd semester.

It's funny how I see people again and it feels like we've been apart for soooo long as opposed to only 2 weeks. This place is definitely some sort of Time Warp.

Even funnier is watching the Newbies wander around with wide fearful eyes! It seems like so long ago that we were those kids. I promise we've kept the hazing to a minimum. For now.

Speaking of Newbies, my best friend Jen from Florida is now a vet prepper here and I'm SO happy to have her here! She's really enjoying herself despite some very entertaining stories of her own adventures during orientation. My particular favorite is her ceiling deciding to pee all over her bed one day after a particularly nasty rainstorm. 2/3 of her bed was soaked through to the bed frame. But all is well, she contacted admin and much to our surprise they had a brand new mattress at her room in 45 minutes. And they paid for her to launder all of her bed linens (which led to some additional amusing anecdotes I won't go into)! All is well for now, however I'm not sure they've done much to patch the hole...

That's all for now, have to get moving and run lots of pre-school errands. IF we can get the car started. Yay for the Kitts!

Fin.

I PASSED.

EVERYTHING.

YAY!!

Think they'll withhold my deposit for this?

So....I'm lying there minding my own business sleeping in a little bit when I hear this loud thump. Not from outside....from inside my room. One of those noises that was loud enough to wake me up but strange enough that you can convince yourself you were dreaming. So I look around, nothing is out of miss, and I close my eyes and start to drift off again. A few minutes later, in my drifting state, I head a louder and more obvious Whump. Now my heart starts beating a little fast, I'm looking around wondering what animal or person is hiding in my room, and considering calling security when I look UP. And see that a very large chunk of plaster has FALLEN FROM THE CEILING just shy of the foot of my bed.

Hmmm, looks like the patch finally gave out...

OH the carnage!

This would not have been a fun wake up call. On my face.

Now it's raining in my room.

Look at that yummy green fuzz tucked in there.....

My new indoor swimming pool.

Think they'll dock my deposit if I just leave this mess for THEM to clean up? To be honest, it's been plastered over once before so I KNOW it's not MY fault.

2/5 DONE.

Two down, three to go.

Anatomy was my biggest concern, so now that it's out of the way bring on the final finals!

In case you guys were curious....here's a smattering of questions from my anat lecture final:

#1. Which of the following is correct?
A. Large volumes of local anesthetics injected into the epidural space can reach nerves proximal to the site of injection. This is not the case for agents injected into the subarachnoid space.
B. The cheif advantage to obtaining a cerebral spinal fluid sample at the lumbosacral junction is that the lumbar intumescence is easily accessible.
C. The subarachnoid space exists by virtue of the cerebral spinal fluid that fills it.
D. In order to avoid inserting a CSF tap needle into a patient's brainstem or spinal cord, the needle should be directed toward the pedicle of the vertebral foramen.
E. Cerebral spinal fluid results help veterinarians to determine the nature of lesions, particularly those that cause vascular damage.

#2. An anesthetic agent that "shuts down" the output of the reticular formation to the cerebral cortex would be expected to:
A. result in paralysis of striated muscle
B. result in atrophy of striated muscle
C. affect the animal's awareness of stimuli
D. affect all sensory neurons
E. affest all lower motor neurons (neurons innervating striated muscle)

#3. A horses's loss of awareness of the position of its joints (for example, the horse's being unaware of the knuckling of the metatarsophalangeal joint of a pelvic limb) could be the result of damage to its:
A. olfactory cortex
B. somatosensory cortex
C. visual (optic) cortex
D. auditory cortex
E. motor cortex

#4. A complete transverse fracture of the olecranon bone will affect the dog's ability to:
A. extend the elbow joint
B. extend the digits
C. extend the shoulder joint
D. flex the elbow joint

#5. T/F. The large intestine of the dog contains haustra and tenia. (I wrote a big WTF next to this one).

#6. Matching the following functions to the appropriate nerves below.
A. Purely motor function
B. Mixed function
C. Special sensory ensory function
Nerves:
1. Olfactory CN
2. Trigeminal CN
3. Trochlear CN

*Extra credit from me if you can number the CNs correctly without cheating!! :)

Alright, guess that's all I'll share. You guys probably already think I'm nutty enough. Just keep in mind that I had 125 of those questions. And I reallllly had to pee around #68.

For those of you who are curious, our retarded school does not release final exam or final course grades until Saturday 8/16 at noon. Which means just before I get on the plane home I'll know whether I should pack light or heavy. No reason to stress about it now!

Have a great week!! :)

Island mechanics.

So our car died two weeks ago. We knew the starter was going bye bye, but were assured by our "no-longer-our-mechanic" mechanic that it should last a long while yet. It seems people here are more interested in not getting paid to not work than to make any money at all. Interesting lifestyle, as opposed to say...the States. Where people would rather get paid to not work.

I digress. For the last two weeks our precious little Ross-mobile has been sitting out at Ziggy's by the beach. Kristin was attempting to return from volleyball with Chris when little precious gave her the finger...so to speak.

Because of our impending finals, we have been lax about getting her back. I checked on her last week, attempted to start her, and was rewarded with a lovely grating grinding noise. Thus starts our adventure of trying to decipher Island Mechanics.

Having had bad luck previously with our "not-our-mechanic-any-longer" mechanic, we consulted the aforementioned Chris who assured us that starters are really easy to install. If we could just find the part, he would put it in with no problem.

Having no Advanced Auto Parts (etc.) here on the island, and also no Island Yellow Pages to consult, I approached our anatomy prof Dr. Danny who happens to be a major car guy on the side.

Side note: I've been drawing the darnedest little cartoons for the vet prep class, nothing special really, but Dr. Danny saw and few and now seems very interested in my illustrating his anatomy text he's working on. Or at least that's the rumor...no actual deals as of yet.

Can you imagine my surprise when Dr. Danny offered to have his mechanic tow our car back to the dorms? He also gave me the name of his auto parts supplier (aptly named Island Auto Supplies) where they have anything and everything we might need (including Flywheels lights for our wheels, SOOO tricking out precious once she's all better!!). I called yesterday morning, and low and behold they had just the right starter in stock! At $800 EC it is a steal, and with Chris installing it we are saving a bundle!

And after all of these wonderful things happened yesterday, we took our anatomy lab final and it was AWESOME. Super easy, very well prepared was I, which is good because I need all of the help I can in that class....what did that 2nd semester tell me earlier? They failed something like 29 people last semester in Anat 1? Out of something like 100 students? They had to adjust the curve to prevent losing too many students?? Hmm.....wonder where all of my stress comes from.
Let's all just hope precious is still sitting there at the beach. With all of her tires. That would be a wonderful pre-finals surprise.