Monday Monday...so good to me.....

Hooray! Only a day and a half til Mom gets here for her visit!

I know, I saw her just 3 months ago, but I'm used to talking with her by phone 3-4 times a week and having lunch or tea with her at least once a week. We still talk, but actually getting to chat in person is going to be great. Besides, I've been itching to show off the school and take her out for a walk with the dogs.

Today was a pretty good day. Mondays are my easy class days and it's always kind of a nice way to ease into the week. Intro to Vet Tech is interesting, but certainly not challenging. We've talked about laws and restrictions regarding tech duties, proper sterilization technique and using MSD sheets, how to appear and act professionally, and a lot of the day to day things that will come up in our careers. Our lectures are really more like discussions with a lot of input from the students, both questions and anecdotes. We were talking about positive communication today and then started the dreaded euthanasia topic.

I think everyone has a slightly different perspective on euthanasia. Some people had very little exposure to it, either personally or professionally, and others were quite experienced. Some said they had a really tough time keeping their emotions in check (one of my friends even started crying as we were discussing it because it upsets her so much), and others of us are able to turn off our personal feelings. I fall into the latter category, and I'm exceedingly grateful that I do. I suppose working at Central helped me with that. Given how many euthanasias we might see on any given night, I either had to learn to cope, or quit. I'm not saying that I don't get upset or that I have no empathy, I'm just able to deal with the situation at hand, comfort the owner and the pet, and then let it all go when I leave the building. I try not to bring any of it home with me, and if I occasionally fail.....well, I have the comfort of knowing that those ones that hit me hard mean I'm still human and I'm not cold. I think that can be a fine line.

Anyway, my other Monday class is Medical Terminology. We always have a quiz, and then a subsequent bitch session as we sit in the hallway waiting for the rest of the class to finish and figure out just how many we got wrong (oh for...hypercapnia! I knew that!!). The rest of the class is just going through the text book and highlighting words that we will need to know for next week, which sounds boring but really isn't. For one thing, we discuss the definitions of words and that can often lead to interesting stories or ideas. For another, occasionally we'll play word games like hangman. Once, Dolores even brought in a bunch of word parts on index cards and passed them out. We had to randomly pick 2 other people and then try to make a word out of the prefix, root, and suffix that we had. I think my favourite from that exercise was dys-rhino-emesis. Given that dys is difficulty, rhino is nose, and emesis is vomiting, I think it makes a weird sort of sense. Of course you'd have difficulty vomiting out of your nose!

The plan for tonight is to finish up my breed summary papers (1 page each, 3 cat breeds, 3 dogs), do some more work on my feeder pig report (ugh, that thing will kill me), write the lab report that's due tomorrow (and that I should have done last week), review for tomorrow's horse quiz (rock on!) and bake cupcakes because one of my school friends has a birthday tomorrow and I'm hoping to surprise her.

Busy busy busy!