Posts tagged School
Back To School Again
Jun 21st
Sorry for not posting lately. Things have been a blur since I’ve come back from NY and yes guys, this is the start of my 5th semester here at the University of the Philippines: Los Banos.
I’ve been in class for just over 2 weeks now and so far it’s been going well. Most of the teachers I have this semester are interesting people. I’m really excited for my surgery and clinician rotations this year. This time around, I’m a junior clinician, which means I’ll have duties doing different rotations in different places around Manila and Laguna. This coming week, we’ll be finishing up a 2-part orientation at the University of the Philippines: Diliman, which is about 2 hours away from Los Banos. That means we’ll have to leave very early in the morning whenever we have duty. When me and my classmates visited the clinic last week, it was cute. It wasn’t as big as I thought it would be, but then again, there were many patients there waiting to be seen. It’s more of a modern hospital I think than the one in Los Banos (which we call Tabon), in that there were sleeping quarters, teaching classrooms, exam rooms and such there in the facility. There seem to be a lot of people there that were students learning for the board exam so that was nice to see.
Also, this semester we’re starting Surgery II and instead of just having 2 surgeries this year, we’ll start to be doing them every week. It’ll be fun, but obtaining the right animals and materials and preparing the protocols for each one will be tiring. They say that the 3rd year is “physically tiring” because you’ll have to do a lot of running around. And already I’m starting to feel that.
I will post more later about my experiences, but I have to read up for my VMED 151 class which is essentially my first medicine course here at the college. Wish me luck this sem!
See ya guys on the flip side!
Classes, Birthdays & Disease
Nov 19th
The week has been going by as a blur and classes have finally started. I also came down with a cold this Monday and have slowly been recovering since. Today is Thursday and I’m feeling lot better which is great but due to my sickness I haven’t really been able to blog. I haven’t had much strength to do anything this past week and just going to classes was a little difficult because I was coughing and throwing up phlegm most of the time.
Alright, that’s not a great picture to begin with, so let’s start over… haha.
This week I finally got started with classes. Most of the classes I’m taking now are mentioned in my last post so I’m just going to go over an interesting lab that we started off Pharmacology II with.
During our pharmacology lab headed by Dr. Bombio, we did an exercise on routes of administration of certain drugs. Each group which consisted of 2 people had to demonstrate how to give liquid and tablet forms of a drug as well as demonstrate subcutaneous and intramuscular injections of drugs. My partner Andrea and I picked up our experimental dog, Whitey, from the place where I live at and brought him to lab. He’s used to being used for drawing blood and such so he was a good sport when we both had to perform the procedures. Dr. Bombio was grading us out of 10 points for doing all the procedures correctly. I have a lot of experience giving oral medications and giving injections from working at the veterinary clinic my dad runs and owns, so obtaining the 10 points was a cinch. Andrea handled the liquid oral medication and the subcutaneous injection while I handled the administration of the oral tablet and intramuscular injection. Out of all the groups we were the quickest to finish, being done with everything in 5 minutes. (Other groups took a good 10-40 minutes to complete the 4 drug administrations due to uncooperative animals and other reasons.) We eventually took the entire 3 hours of lab class to finish everyone’s groups, but it was a fun lab.
But here are some tips for those who are thinking of practicing drug administration on small animals:
- Bring a dog – Giving a pill to a cat is, in the words of many of my professors at CVM, “hell.” Giving pills or injections to cats is usually not easy compared to doing so with most dogs. Also, they are flexible and are more prone to scratch you if they are not restrained properly.
- Being a medium to large breed – Giving medications to larger animals and dogs tends to be easier. From experience in working at a clinic, the pain threshold for cats and toy breed dogs is really low compared to that of say, your Golden Retriever. Most of the time you can give a subcutaneous injection to a large animal quite easily, but for the smaller ones, you may want to opt for a smaller gauge needle or find another way to administer the drug.
- Restrain properly! – This is a problem I saw way too often during my lab. You should know how to restrain an animal properly before administering a drug to any animal. Usually taking up the scruff on the back of a cat is enough to administer an injection. (For fractious cats, the use of a towel may help in calming the animal down). For dogs you can hold them in the air (for injections) or restrain them on a table. If on a table you should put your left arm around the dog and hold it’s head in place with your left hand. You can use the right hand to place pressure on the right forelimb if administering an injection to a blood vessel (for those who are left-handed you do the opposite).
- Be gentle but firm – Always approach animals calmly and slowly. Also, while restraining do not use unnecessary force. Generally, the more force you use, the more the animal will resist. With proper restraint, you will usually be able to perform the drug administration easily and prevent many injuries.
Of course with the above list there are always exceptions to the rules. Some cats may be easier to handle than dogs. In my experience, if you raise an animal since birth and start to acclimate it to different things (e.g. playing with its ears, giving it pills, holding/restraining it on a regular basis) procedures like drug administration tend to be easier. If they’re used to it, they’ll resist it less. Make sense?
This week we started our lectures and I’m really excited for surgery. I have my first lab tomorrow for surgery at the Tabon Teaching Hospital in the early afternoon and that’s how I’ll end my day. First I have to finish a Parastiology II lab and lecture, but I think the day will go smoothly. Well at least I hope so, because…
IT’S MY BIRTHDAY TOMORROW!! Hahaha… I’m turning 24 this year. Gosh… where has the time gone by?
Anyway, I’m off to finish typing up some notes and then I’ll be heading over to a friends’ place for dinner. I’ll see you all on the flip side!
P.S. — Just some really random things for you to enjoy if you’ve got a free minute. Check out these two chicken commercials the Wonder Girls did recently. There are two versions. You can find them here and here. Aren’t they hilarious? I just thought I’d share… =)
School Has Started!
Nov 10th
So I embark on my 3rd semester here at the University of the Philippines: Los Banos. After registration that I completed last Friday, I patiently waited for school to start on Monday. During my last moments of freedom, I mostly spent my time watching old movies that I had downloaded, but never finished watching and cartoons. It was a nice. ^_^
Monday was the start of class and things went pretty smoothly. I say that, because 2 of the 4 classes that I was supposed to have that day were canceled or the professors didn’t show up. On Monday I was supposed to have the following classes in the following order:
Unfortunately, I only had surgery lecture and the pharmacology lecture. Actually, they weren’t really lectures as much as an introduction to the course and overview of the syllabi. Although we didn’t end up having 2 classes that day, I have to admit that it was kind of nice not having to go through too much. It was like we were easing into the semester, and today it felt the same way.
Today I was supposed to have my Veterinary Pathology II (VPTH 122) lecture class this morning at 10am, but our professor never showed up, so all of the students were once again left in the classroom to just talk. Next up was supposed to be our Virology (VMCB 123) lecture class but alas, that was canceled as well. So we had a long lunch break from 11-1pm. My friends James, Faye, Belle and I went to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) cafeteria for lunch. I had mentioned this cafeteria in a blog about my parasitology collection project for my Parasitology I course a few weeks ago. We usually go there when we have time to kill and are able to enjoy some good food.
After that we decided to hit up the Rice Research Institute Museum, because we had never been inside before. It was an interesting site. There were many different instruments they used to harvest rice and also many types of rice the raised and cultivated. Rice is really a staple food of many Asian countries and is major part of the diet for 50% of the population of the world. It was a small museum with very old artifacts and tools from different countries, but it was very informative and it was nice to walk around. When we entered we pretty much had the entire museum to ourselves. It wasn’t big, but big enough to kill about half-an-hour in. It’s too bad I didn’t have my camera. I could’ve posted some pictures of what was in it here in the blog. As we were leaving a large group of people entered the museum to explore, so we ended our tour just in time.
Anyway, we headed back to campus to go to our Veterinary Microbiology II (VMCB 122) lab class. Our teacher was about 20 minutes late, but Dr. Rovira just went over the syllabus with us while Ate Dang, the lab tech handed out our lab manuals and also accepted payments for materials we’ll be needing in lab soon. Dr. Rovira is a nice lady and has an interesting way of speaking. She speaks in a very reserved and somewhat slow tone, so it takes awhile to get through topics, but she’s a nice person and I think I’m going to enjoy her lab.
We ended class within an hour and after that we had about another hour to kill before our next class, which was going to be Veterinary Pharmacology II (VPHM 142) laboratory. So me and the other 3 friends headed to the Student Union to play a few rounds of billiards before class started. James drove us there, we paid for a table and played almost 2 games. We didn’t have time to end the 2nd game mostly because Faye took a lot of time shooting (she was a novice at the game and didn’t play much beforehand), but it was still fun nonetheless. I enjoyed playing with all of them, but the weather was hot and sticky. Since the billiard tables were located in the basement of the building, it was kind of stuffy in there. James and I couldn’t make accurate shots mostly because our hands were so sweaty and the cue stick didn’t come off very well during our release. But that’s okay. We still had fun!
After that we headed to our lab class where Dr. Ariel Bombio (our past Anatomy associate professor) was heading the section. We went over the syllabus, got grouped into pairs that we’d be working with for the rest of the semester and within an hour-and-a-half we were done. My partner is my acquaintance Andrea. I believe she’s a 3rd year veterinary student, but is taking some 2nd year courses due to extenuating circumstances. (Don’t quote me on that… she’s not in our batch so I don’t talk to her much… haha) Anyway, the lab will be interesting, mostly because we’ll be doing practical exercises relating to veterinary pharmacology. Things related to anesthesia, routes of administration, etc. It’s going to be different than last semester since back then all we did was really write prescriptions, memorize important drugs and do dose calculations. Now we’ll actually be able to work with real animals, so that’ll be a blast for sure.
After that I went home, typed up my notes and then had some dinner. And now here I am typing out this entry. So far, the semester has been slowly starting for me, which I kind of like. But I hope that soon we’ll be getting started on the real work… especially for surgery class. I’m REALLY excited for that course.
Anyway, I’m going to go. Hope all of you are doing well! Leave a comment if you have time. Thanks all!
