YOU KNOW YOU’RE A VET STUDENT WHEN….
You review slides of avian anatomy while eating chicken for dinner and try to identify the structures on the dinner plate.
You think it is great to find that cow’s ovary!
You laugh when an instructor tells you that their exam is straight forward and only covers the major things you’ll need to know especially for boards or everyday in practice.
You can sleep in any position, anywhere, with any amount of noise if you sit still for more than 15 minutes.
You can give a complete morphological description a sample from a necropsy done more than 10 years ago and can also discuss the pathogenesis for Special Pathology.
You have a scale for the consistency of diarrhea.
You get phone calls from everyone that is related to you or has ever known you about what is wrong with their cat, dog, horse, lizard, snake, pet rat, bird, fish, and maybe even their kids.
You think that more than 6 hours of sleep a night is excessive.
You haven’t eaten a meal without simultaneously reviewing your notes or reading a journal or textbook for 3 years.
You can identify the type of suture pattern that is called for in your mending.
You can identify the species by the smell of the feces at 10 paces.
You can gross out “normies” in a trivia contest with interesting facts gleaned from anatomy and theriogenology about pigs, horses, cattle, and all other species.
You can’t remember what day it is, but you know when the next three exams are in relation to that very minute.
Your favorite word is blethrospasm or polioenchelphalomalasia.
You go to “McKill-you” with a diagnosis and wonder why they can’t run an arterial blood gas and still don’t have digital radiographs.
You already know that you need an antibiotic that is active against Gram negative bacteria. When the doctor tells you what they are giving you, you think of at least 2 other drugs that would be better, especially if you happen to be a horse.
You read your own radiographs, ultrasounds, and lab work before listening to a MD. You have to turn the radiograph 90 degrees to really understand it, though.
You think you might have blasto, crypto, ringworm or psuedorabies when you get sick.
You know if it is large bowel or small bowel diarrhea.
You can discuss the finer points of exudates, transudates, and purulent discharges.
Your pets run away from you when you are petting them because you are now palpating them and they don’t like to have their kidneys palpated.
You wake up in the middle of the night tracing the blood supply from the abdominal viscera to the heart and back through the lymphatic system.
You hurt yourself and you can identify the afferent nerve that is conducting the pain along the notoceptive neuropathway.
You can fill out any scantron sheet ever printed without looking.
You pay for your textbooks by the pound and even ask for more reference books for Christmas gifts.
You can take lecture notes in your sleep.
You don’t even look at the 5 new e-mails asking you to find homes for pets or special needs animals.
You own and wear coveralls with rubber boots.
You find yourself looking at the heifers at the dairy farm as you drive past to see how they look.
You can eat pizza or sub sandwiches for 5 lunches in a row, because it is free food. You can also listen to any lecture or product presentation to earn the free food.
Large amounts of student loans that would scare a normal human mean nothing to you.
You are deficient in Vitamin D because you came in at 6:30 AM (before the sun rose) to write the SOAP on your Junior Surgery patient and stayed until after 5:30 PM (after the sunset) to do it again.
You think it is exciting to get a phone call at 1:30 AM to come in and help with a horse that may go into surgery. When the horse dies on the table, you get to glove up and put your hands in to feel the lesion. Awesome!
You can’t remember what you used to do with all that free time before studying for the never ending exams.
You KNOW that every course you take is the MOST IMPORTANT course you will take here and that you will need to know every detail in practice everyday after you have to know it for Boards, because every instructor tells you that on the first day of class.
You sleep for 2 days straight after finals.
You don’t think that the smell of the anatomy lab is gross or that you might smell funny.
You have to make doctor appointments on Saturday mornings so you don’t miss classes.
You critique the surgeons and doctors on shows like Grey’s Anatomy and House. You can make the diagnosis 15 minutes before the TV doctors do.
Your family members call to ask what the doctor really said to them because they don’t understand the fancy words.
You always keep a clean set of scrubs in your locker because you are sure to need them sooner or later.
You can identify every muscle, nerve and major blood vessel in any cut of meat in the table even after it is cooked.
You can discuss the current price of feed and the market price for cattle and pork based on the 100 weight.
You can’t look at a guinea pig without thinking it is a miniature horse with the same hindgut digestive system.
You threaten to castrate your soon-to-be ex-boyfriend because you have already done neuters in junior surgery and it can’t be any harder than a cat neuter.
You question your sanity and decision-making skills on a daily basis. Of course your non-vet student friends are always asking if you are crazy to be in vet school.
Your stethoscope costs more than anything else you have bought since before you started in vet school except for textbooks.
You practice hand throws every time you need to tie a knot.
You understand DHLP, but not DPT for children.
You understand things like PUPD, TPLO, HR, RR, ISCAVMA, AAEP, CO, ADR, bid, mg/kg and hundreds of other insensible sequences of letters.
Putting an x after nearly any letter of the alphabet suddenly makes it meaningful: Tx, Dx, Sx, Fx, Hx, Px, Rx...
You know which muscles are cramping when you get a Charlie horse.
You feed your pets based on their metabolic demand and BCS.
You don’t care what the Henderson-Haselbach equation means, but you will never forget it.
You are sure that the most important commandment, “Thou shall not contaminate a sterile field, never, never, ever” supersedes all the other 10.
You feed the cat food or dog food that you get free or really cheap through the vet school, just because it is free and you don’t have to go to the grocery store to get it.
Going to the grocery store is not a priority, neither is paying bills, seeing movies, exercising, going to the dentist, or getting the oil changed in your car until after the next round of exams.
You have to run home to let the dogs out or feed the cat whenever there is break in the schedule, plus your friends understand why you can’t go out to lunch with them.
All of your pens are from pet food or veterinary supply venders. And you have a cabinet full of water bottles with the same logos on them.
You suddenly crave bacon after completing your swine health class. Not to mention that you know which muscles of the rectus sheath you are getting.
There you have it...
-e
You poor, crazy, wonderful, vet, you!
