Back To School

"Back to school. Back to school, to prove to Dad that I'm not a fool. I got my lunch packed up, my boots tied tight, I hope I don't get in a fight. Ohhhh, back to school. Back to school. Back to school. Well, here goes nothing." - Billy Madison

Well its another quarter in the life of a Broadview University student, and that means new classes. I had a decent 3 week break from school... definitely not long enough and i wish that break included a break from work as well. But it was nice not to have to worry about studying and homework and waking up early.

My first class I am taking is Basic Hematology. Blood and lots of it. Fortunately last week I got a heads up on veins with my practice on shooting a drug into the jugular vein of a horse.... My friend Hutch told me he needs me to be his vet from now on... so he taught me how to find the vein and inject it. Only thing is we had to make sure we didn't hit an artery or it would really mess the horse up, so I was kind of freaked out because I didn't know the difference between a vein and an artery. Well after the first day of school I found out, you'd have to be really really bad at injecting and practically at a 90 degree angle deep into the animal to hit the artery, and arteries have bright blood and keeps pumping. Veins are closer to the surface, hit it at a 30 degree angle, and has darker blood. Fortunately I hit the vein and the horse slowly dozed off so he could get his feet trimmed. Hitting it wasn't as hard as I thought. Since this class is basic hematology I will be doing a lot of blood draws from the cephalic and saphenous veins from dogs and cats and learn all the components of bloods, smears, slides, etc....

Adult ascarids in the small intestine of a horse

My next class is Parasitology.... Ticks, lice, fleas, tapeworm, heart-worm, giardia, bots, flukes, nematodes... you get the idea. We learn all about the different types and how to do tests. This includes dealing with blood, urine, skin, hair, and my favorite... poop. Poop smears, fecal floats, poop soup... its going to be grand. This will probably one of my more harder classes this quarter, just because there is a lot of information to cover and remember. Everyone, including my teacher, says this class is one of the more harder ones just because of all the information to study.

My third class is Lab Animals, Pocket Pets, and Exotics. I am pretty excited for this class. We will get to cover all the animals excluding dogs/cats/large/production. So this means: rats, mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, hedge hogs, sugar gliders, birds, reptiles.... and so on. It will be fun, especially working at PetSmart I work with a lot of the animals in this category.

After 11 weeks I'll be done with this classes, have a week break and move on to my next set of vet tech classes. So far the program has been great, learning lots, and its definitely something that is for me. So until next time....