S2 Week 11: Neuropathology, Wellness Week and Easter!
We are officially down to the final two months of the semester and are charging at full speed towards the end of our neurology block!
Monday started out with three lectures on neuropathology. These lectures were super interesting because we were able to look at the appearance of different histological lesions and learn about the clinical signs that may arise and what may have caused them. The prior four weeks had been heavily focused on the overall mechanistic actions of the nervous system so these pathology lectures were a fun way to tie things together!
This week also happened to be the vet school’s “Week of Wellness” meaning that the school had a multitude of different activities and lunch talks that focused on promoting overall wellbeing. Monday’s lunch talk speaker was Dr. Tiana Kelly who is a part of the “Not One More Vet” organization. NOMV is an group that helps raise awareness of the mental health problems in the veterinary profession. Veterinarians have a 5x higher exposure to death than human physicians and this has been seen to take a toll on the mental wellness of these professionals. NOMV provides online peer to peer support and also provide members of the veterinary profession with the education and resources needed to fight mental health battles. Dr. Kelly’s talk was focused on compassion fatigue and ways to promote wellness in vet school and the workplace. She started off the talk by discussing the compassion spectrum.
This spectrum is broken into three categories:
1. Compassion satisfaction: healthy balance emotionally / things are going well
2. Empathetic distress: More acute emotional imbalance that may be linked to a particular relationship or event
3. Burnout: Chronic distress across the board that affects things beyond work. Individuals may have feelings of energy depletion/exhaustion and an increased mental distance from one’s job
After this spectrum was explained, we then discussed the five phases of compassion fatigue commonly seen in the veterinary profession.
These are listed below 1-5 in the order of how it may progress:
1. Zeal: This person is always willing to help, volunteer, and be involved in anything and everything. There is no sign of compassion fatigue at this point in time
2. Irritability: This person is still doing all of their usual things and is likely still showing a good attitude. They may however be snappier in certain situations or have a little less enthusiasm than usual
3. Withdraw: This person is beginning to distance themselves from work or people or may be neglecting themselves and/or others they care about
4. Zombie: This person may begin to be very impatient and see others as incompetent. They may also seem to have lost some of their zest for life
5. Pathology and victimization or maturity and renewal: This last phase can present in two different ways. The first way is the route of pathology and victimization. This person will be in a state of overwhelm and will not take action. They may act like a victim and not attempt to change or improve their situation. The other route is maturity and renewal. This person will acknowledge how they feel and take the steps needed to improve their current state. This leads to resilience and mental toughness.
These stages can fluctuate and people may bounce between different levels from time to time. It is also important to understand that there are many factors that affect how someone responds to life events. Dr. Kelly explained that the three main factors that influence a person’s response to difficult events can be unique to the individual, situation, and the veterinary environment. Each person has a personal coping style that is affected by their personality, values, resilience, and mindset. Since no two people are quite alike, they will all react to a certain event in a slightly different manner. The current situation that a person is in will also affect the way they handle an adverse life event. If there are already a lot of external life stressors building up, the person will likely have a shorter amount of emotional energy to pull from before things are too overwhelming. The last factor that Dr. Kelly discussed was the impact of the veterinary/work environment. Someone that has extremely heavy workload demands, a lack of resources, and feels isolated will likely be less resilient when experiencing compassion fatigue compared to someone that is in a healthy work environment with people who support and care for them.
The talk ended by going over a few things that can help improve wellness in the veterinary setting as well as in day-to-day life. Optimism, a solid support network, a good work/school environment, and self-care were all things that had been seen to increase mental wellbeing and lucky for us, some of these are directly in our control. Self-care is something that we have the ability to take full ownership over and it is crucial that we prioritize making time for ourselves because if we are not prioritizing ourselves, we will not be able to show up for our patients at the level we are capable of.
The rest of Monday finished up with two lectures on neuroimaging followed by a case-based discussion. This discussion was a way to solidify the recently acquired brain imaging knowledge.
Tuesday began with another lecture on neuropathology followed by another case-based discussion on neuroimaging. This discussion consisted of roughly 7 cases and was a fun way to further apply the knowledge from the prior day’s lectures and discussion. That afternoon included a lab that was focused on correlative and applied cross-sectional anatomy. This lab was also very case-based and was a nice way to understand how different lesions in the brain may elicit certain clinical symptoms.
That evening Morgan and I, along with some other vet school friends, attended the VEG wellness dinner talk. VEG stands for Veterinary Emergency Group and we had a wonderful set of emergency doctors speak about their path in veterinary medicine and give some advice for “soon to be vets”. Here are some key things that stuck out to me during the talk:
Your job is something that allows you to live your life, it is not your life: Work should be something that allows us to live the life that we want, it should never be your whole life. A healthy balance between life and work is crucial for mental sanity. You need to know who you are outside of veterinary medicine because being a veterinarian is just a title, it is not and should not be someone’s whole personality. Finding hobbies and things to do outside of work is incredibly important for long-term career satisfaction.
It’s ok to be too busy to do things that are not in your job description, but it is never ok to be too important to do things that are not in your job description: This quote stuck with me because it shows the value of teamwork and the fact that no one is “too good” to do something. I vividly remember one of my first days volunteering in a vet clinic and the vet was working on a dog that started to defecate and she immediately grabbed the paper towels to start cleaning it up. She could have called one of the vet assistants to do that because it was “below her” but she quickly did it herself. This was likely not a big deal to her but my respect for her grew because she was a team player. We may all have different titles, but no title is more important than another, they are just different.
Your patients are not their diseases. When the days are busy and you are rushing from patient to patient, it may be easy to lose sight of the fact that we are dealing with someone’s family member. Instead of “dealing with the heart failure dog in room three”, try rephrasing that to “taking care of Joey in room three”. When we begin to boil our patients down to the disease they have, we need to take a step back and realize we are here to treat the animal as a whole, not just their primary condition. That animal is someone’s whole life and discounting them as their disease is a sign that we may need to reassess our frame of mind.
Wednesday started off with the final neuropathology lecture of the week followed by two lectures that were centered on the motor systems. The afternoon concluded with an anatomy lab focused on the anatomy of the meninges, main cranial nerves, and the arteries and nerves of the brain.
Thursday began off with a discussion on professional communication. This involved some key aspects of client interactions and different methods to improve client compliance and patient care. We then had another lecture on the motor systems and a case-based discussion on neuro localization. This discussion was focused on two cases and we were given the neuroexam findings along with any diagnostics that had been performed. We then had the ability to work through different problems and come up with a list of differentials. That afternoon finished up with a lab on neuropathology which helped tie up all of the lectures from the earlier part of the week!
Friday started off with a nice hot yoga session followed by a run with Churro. The rest of the day was spent studying for the upcoming neuro exam and Saturday followed a similar layout.
Sunday started off with a nice run with Churro and then Katelyn and I went to church. The afternoon was spent catching up on some things around the house and finished with an Easter celebration at Dr. McLarty’s house. Dr. McLarty made a variety of delicious snacks from scratch and also lead some worship on her piano! It was super sweet of her to open her home to students and it was a fun way to spend time with people outside of the classroom!
Quote of the week: "Does this analogy not work? You all look confused." - Dr. Toedebusch
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