Today was our physical diagnosis lab on swine. I love our P.D. labs. It's the only time that I actually feel like I'm working towards something. It's hard to sit in class day after day and not get to put your hands on living animals. You start to fall into a dull routine and feel like you are walking the same, albeit substantially more difficult, path that you walked during undergrad if you were a science major of some sort.
It's hard for the non-animal people to grasp the significance of touching something living to animal people like myself and my classmates. And today, we donned our navy coveralls and work boots and gleefully charged into the small animal hospital on campus. We are fortunate to have a small pig nursery of about 8 sows and approximately 60 four week old piglets. If you've never been in a swine facility (like me), then the first thing that you will hit you is the overwhelming scent of pig. You may think, like me, " Oh, Pigs. How bad could they really smell?". The answer is horrible. It will knock you flat on your back, and we have a small, very clean facility. I can't even imagine the smell at a large scale swine facility. You take the smell home with you too. Oh, sure. You can change. You can shower, but it will follow you like a bad disease.
Disregarding the smell, the piglets were rather adorable (at standing distance). Grab one by the hind leg and let the fun begin! You have never had anything so adorable and so loud in your hands before. I'm pretty sure that I'm still rather deaf from this morning.
Unfortunately, life can't always be P.D. labs. After two hours, it's back to real life and back to ever-looming school work. So, with my update, I head off again to the underworld of studying anatomy. Please hope for the best for me and my classmates. We really need it.
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