Week 6: Highs and Lows

Those who know me know that I say what I think, but I don't always say what I feel.  I also tend to magnify or exacerbate whatever mood I'm in with my thoughts. I think everyone does this to a degree, with their state of mind coloring their perception of events and thoughts, but I find myself a particularly good example of this.  As a result, this week has been a real roller coaster.  I experienced both highs and lows in vet school exam outcomes.  We had a developmental anatomy exam last Friday that went extremely well for me and a physiological chemistry exam this Tuesday that went extremely poorly.  I understand that I have to take the bad with the good and there will be exams for which I am inadequately prepared, but I will say that p-chem did pop my wonderful rosy-colored vet school bubble that I had going until 10am on Tuesday morning.  Ok vet school, the honeymoon is over, the blush is off the rose, this is hard.

I took as much time as possible on the test and pulled out all the test taking strategies I had, but my brain was just not willing to recall enough for me to answer very many of the questions with any degree of certainty.  I'm not sure exactly what happened.  I think a combination of things.  I took less time to study for this test than the last because I was so busy preparing for Developmental.  There was more material as well, so I think that my study strategies didn't help me to synthesize all the chapters into an overarching knowledge of carbohydrate metabolism.  I felt pretty awful coming out of the exam, despite it being a beautiful sunny day.  I tried to shake it off and I think I did a reasonably good job, but the energy it took to not let it get me too down made it difficult to keep working on other things.  I had a hard time paying attention in my next class and called it an early night without finishing all my reading for the next day.  This made me extremely conscious of the feeling I've had since I got here of being on an ever accelerating treadmill.  It makes me feel a little like a shark, but not in the fierce predator, top of the food chain way; rather, in the ram ventilator, stop swimming and die way.

Thursday cheered me up considerably because we had clinical skills which involved cow tipping.  Seriously, although we call it "casting," we tied ropes around cows and pulled them down onto the ground and over onto their sides.  I made a fast forward video of the demonstration to share the joy with you all:

We also did physical examinations on the Tufts sheep and the teaching beagles and bandaged horse hooves.  I have to say that the casting was by far the most exciting.  The heifers (which, for those of you not familiar with cow lingo, is a female bovine that has not yet had any calves) are still fairly new to Tufts and are not used to being handled, so many of them pulled away from us and ran amok, leading to a fair bit of chaos.  We finished the day exhausted, but content and reminded of why we suffer through exams like the Tuesday one.  I came home Thursday to an e-mail saying that my Developmental Anatomy grade had actually been raised by a few points due to some classmates noticing errors in the grading.  My roommate came home on time, which is rare, and cooked us both dinner and I got a check in the mail from my car insurance company for overpayment. Oh yes, the world is awesome, life rocks.

What I really need is for the up days and the down days to be slightly less extreme because I'm suffering from a little bit of emotional whiplash.