So. It is early March, still wintry outside (my anxiously-anticipated ride in the sunshine yesterday morning was cut short by thick grey clouds and a bitter wind - rats...) and though the mega-icicles are gone piles of ugly used snow remain behind and the kitchen window is liberally smeared with muddy dog pawprints. But...the birds are singing with increasing vigor, the ponies are beginning to shed (Advice: never stand downwind of a pony you are grooming during the shedding season if you are wearing chapstick....), and that most important harbinger of spring, at least in the Wheel of MY Year - THE CONVENTION - has come and gone.
"The Convention," also referred to as "the OVMA" by us vintage vets (OSU '88, GO BUCKS!), is the annual end-of-February, four day veterinary medical extravaganza that takes place in downtown Columbus Ohio at the Hyatt Regency Convention Center. As the veteran-veterinarian (sorry but I couldn't resist that) of many such events (I think I've only missed one) I take some delight in observing its growth and changes over the years since OSU spit me out on an unsuspecting animal population.
A word about the name(s) - formally this event is now called The Midwest Veterinary Conference; it is put on by the Ohio Veterinary Medical Association and was known as "The OVMA Convention" back in the days when I attended as a buggy-eyed, wet-behind-the-ears vet student, bent mainly on picking up bag after bag full of samples of pet food, pens, IV fluid rate guides and assorted other "swag." Along with similar events throughout the country at various times of the year (e.g. North American Veterinary Conference in Florida in January) "the Convention" provides us with hours and hours of presentations ranging from the extremely useful "Pearls of Wisdom" seminars to the questionable ("Aligning Your Chi" Cheeeezzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....) to the coma-inducing (which titles I won't mention at the risk of offending a specialist from whom I may need to solicit advice, but which generally have the term "Metabolism" in the title, a red flag for a seminar guaranteed to be chock full with (*yawn*) charts and graphsssszzzzzzzzz. (Photos - I want photos!! Give me tumors the size of baseballs, wounds into which you can insert your entire hand , kidneys shriveled up like raisins! 'Cause ya know what one picture is worth, yes??) Regardless of our choice of sessions, the hours are totalled and eventually sent in to prove to the State Office Of Powers that Be that we have indeed been good children and racked up the required biannual 30 Continuing Education hours.
(All sarcasm aside, I have been to some really excellent lectures, most of which leave me either a) excited to try new techniques, b)satisfied that I've handled a case correctly or c)more than a little relieved that it IS possible for someone with a more advanced degree than mine to, well, screw up from time to time).
That said, and pushing on..Oh, my, how "the OVMA" as we old farts often still refer to it, has changed. First and foremost - you can now not only register online in the relative comfort of your jammies - you can also get the notes for the classes you wish to attend ahead of time off the website, print them out, and if you are STILL a gunner like you were in vet school ( you know who you are, and in answer to your question, NO, I WASN'T!), you can study them ahead of time. Of course all this goes to waste if a late-February snowstorm leaves your speaker stranded in an airport in, say, Dubuque (I like that word), but it's generally worth the gamble, if only to keep your hand from becoming permanently cramped, and let's face it, it's been a long time since I exercised those muscles that enabled me to take pages of notes for hours on end. Scribbling in patients' charts now is alleviated by the occasional Rottweiler-wrestling session, after all. At least having printed notes prevents writers' cramp by leaving only a limited amount of space in which to scribble, and in fact as often as not my margins are occupied by either swirling doodles or remarks that may eventually be turned into literary masterpieces such as the one you are perusing at the moment. (Butt-cramp, however, is still a problem which I have not entirely sorted out and which, with advancing years, will probably only get worse.)
In the last century, attendees to the conference were presented with a bound book- or books- of printed notes that weighed - and I'm not exaggerating - about 15 lbs, maybe more. Of course if your car was parked in the convenient Hyatt parking garage you could dump the extraneous notes (and swag) and lighten your load periodically but parking farther away - and more on THAT in a minute!! - meant that you were destined to lurch through the convention center like an overburdened camel until you could find enough time to hike to your vehicle and divest yourself of the excess.
About that parking garage: to my knowledge it has not undergone any significant construction to lower the parking levels, yet for the first time this year I was informed that my pickup truck was too high to park in the garage. WTF?!? "I've been parking in here for 20 years!" I told the attendant, who was unimpressed and said over an obnoxious mechanical buzzing noise, "It won't let you park here now." ( What the hell's IT? WHO the hell's IT? Do I need to sacrifically let some air out of my truck tires in deference to IT so that IT will let me park in the garage again?)
Well. It would be simpler to just drive the Honda and let Keith borrow the truck, but I like a my big, gas sucking pickup on I-70 so that tooling down the road at 70 mph I am not in as much danger of being swept away by truckers going 90. So be it. I parked in the hinterlands this year beyond BF Egypt and soothed myself with the notion that at least all that hiking would help alleviate Seminar Butt Cramp ("SBC" - we veterinarians like abbreviations. As you may imagine, we have a whale of a time with license plate letters).
The Conference - since I've been attending - has always been in the Hyatt Regency Convention Center in downtown Columbus, a location which I like for several reasons: it is right across the street from a remarkable emporium known as the Yankee Trader, wherein one can purchase all sorts of ephemera from MardiGras beads to fake anatomy parts (plastic boobs and gluteal enhancements predominate) to rubber bugs and raffle tickets. Essentially it's a store for lawn fete prizes and similar stuff. So if you ever want a spongy, life size red brain, I know where to get one for you. I also like the Hyatt location because North Market just a block west of the Convention Center, enough of a walk, especially if there is a brisk breeze outside with a wind chill of -4 degrees, to clear your head, and enough distance to provide yet another emergency treatment for SBC. North Market has a remarkable assortment of food counters, both foreign and domestic; some of the best popcorn in Ohio; and ice cream to die for. Bonus: the people watching's great. Last year I observed a young guy at the salsa/hot sauce shop, asking for the "hottest sauce" the shop owner had. She smeared some pasty green stuff on a cracker and he tucked in. He grew redder and sweatier as the seconds passed until finally his eyes had swollen shut and steam was rolling off his brow. "Man, is that good!" he choked. Now I'm a firm believer in the fact that food shouldn't hurt, but I had to try, so I dipped into the same sauce although my portion was admittedly a lot smaller - a little bigger than a fingernail paring. Pea-sized at best. And I wheezed and snorted and blew my nose all the way through the first two afternoon lectures on Gastrointestinal Emergency Surgeries. But I had to try! I'm not sure I'm a better person for it but I still hold with the philosophy that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." (I think that was discussed in Gastrointestinal Emergency Surgeries, incidentally....)
Earlier I mentioned the freebies - the layout of the convention encompasses many large and unexciting lecture rooms, but in the middle of it all is...(trumpets, please) The Trade Show. Row upon row of displays of specialized diets (with some samples, though not as much as there used to be), surgical equipment, drugs, supplements, supplies and (ooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh) BOOKS. Not to mention fun stuff such as shirts peddled by student organizations and, just in case you blasted out of town and forgot somebody's birthday or other critical event, a variety of critter jewelry.
Fun. I still get a little thrill out of looking over displays of polished, finely made surgical instruments - must be the silver and gold! - and of course the published material is hard to pass up. I shelled out several hundred dollars this year for a 2-volume updated set of internal medicine textbooks and when the guy said " is there anything else I can help you with?" I said "yes but it'd be hard to pack the whole rest of the display out of here." It's tough to choose! There's just something about new books...The depressing thing about the trade show, though, is all the cool new equipment that is just a tad beyond my reach, financially speaking, to purchase: Ultrasounds, digital x-ray units, flexible endoscopes (yes, those go just where you'd expect them to go....)...wow! Who WOULDN'T be an expert diagnostician with all those toys? The new technology is wonderful, amazing, superb...but it ain't cheap.
The conference, as I mentioned, lasts four days; I only attend the first two because my brain would explode if I tried to do this stuff for four days in a row. In addition, the first two days are quieter, less crowded, more relaxed - primarily because a lot of DVM's and staff are still working and only take the weekend off, but also because the rest of the convention center proper often is not fully occupied until some other event fills in the empty rooms. Most years recently our convention has overlapped some - well, for want of a better word, Cheerleaders' Conference. I don't know what the proper name for this event is, as I try desperately to be out the door before all available elevators are taken over by loads of quivering, overly made-up glittery little girls carrying pompoms and shepherded by overly made-up, equally glittery mothers with attitudes like German Shepherd Dogs. (There is glitter everywhere. EVERYWHERE. On the floors, on your clothes if you share the elevators with a herd of them..it even works its way into your luggage...). I will always wonder at the motivation that makes a woman WANT her elementary school child to dress and wear makeup that screams "slut!" It just ain't right...and I see it, year after year. So I try to be pelting down the highway headed for home late on a Friday afternoon before the first wave of sparklies hits the Hyatt door.
But the best, oh, by far the best conference "overlaps" were the years in the '90's when the vets congregated at the same time as - wait for it - The Arnold Schwartznegger Fitness event (extravaganza? circus?). We DVM's - with our practical haircuts, our work-worn hands, our late winter-pale skins and post-holiday office-cookie flab, found ourselves surrounded by PERFECT BODIES! It was amazing and not a little disconcerting! I remember going up in the elevator surrounded by these flawless women who all looked like versions of Barbie dolls, and since I am a FEMALE vet (sporting all of the above external characteristics) I have to say I just kind of huddled in the corner and oozed out the elevator door to my floor as unobtrusively as possible. The sights were pretty amazing - men with shoulders about 6' across - and there truly WERE "Arnold sightings" as well, though I wasn't among the elect on that score.
My most memorable moment of those convention years occurred early one Thursday morning; I had left the house at 5 a.m. and made the 2 hour drive with a little time to spare, so was moseying along the corridors from the Hyatt garage (yeah, THAT one) to the seminar rooms, idly observing the folks around me, while still in that early-morning, running-low-on-caffeine fog. I remember thinking how nice it was that the unofficial dress code of my student days - business suits and heels for the convention - had become more casual, such that nice jeans and boots had become perfectly acceptable. We could sit through the seminars in comfort, same as we had in vet school! Aaahh...and just look at that gal ahead of me, she's wearing....what is that, black lycra pants? Hmmm...and a slinky leopard-skin lycra top? What was up with her? And that guy with her (the one with the six food shoulders) - what the heck was he doing, wearing the same thing? And that kid with them, also dressed the same...wait a minute! (my fog was lifting...) That's not a kid! That's a DWARF!!! At this point my brain kicked in gear enough to say to the rest of me "what the hell's going on around here???" and I realized I was adrift in a current of weirdly-dressed people (OK, so I don't exactly hang out with body-builders...). About that time I passed the signs that welcomed Fitness Convention attendees, and it all made a sort of surreal sense - but suffice it to say we DVM's had a lot of fun that year.
Anyway, another year, another convention is in the bag; I got eleven of this year's 15 hours done and will pick up 2 more tonight at a dinner seminar on parasitology (this seems like a hell of a time to eat spaghetti, but it's at Bravo's, of all things...), and I got another hour's worth last night..sitting on the couch with my computer in my lap, tapping into an approved continuing education website for a seminar by one of my old OSU professors on Hyperadrenocorticism. And while the technology is better, the subject is as convoluted as it ever was - even if I'm relaxed enough to be wearing pajamas. Just not motivated to try the lycra, though.
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