bye babies
And just like that, I'm done with another rotation.
It's amazing how fast 2 weeks can go by, if you don't stop moving...
This weekend was slightly crazy, but I definitely needed it, after the slow week I had. I was on call Saturday, and I had a sick 33 hour old Freisian foal come in - it won the prize for low blood pH this season (bad). So I spent the bulk of the day working her up, writing a monster SOAP and otherwise being a space cadet now that I had a geniunely very sick foal to deal with. I learned a ton from her just in the 2 days I've worked on her, and I'm sad she won't be my case anymore.
So after I finished dealing with Lucy (Blair came up with that... after "Lucy in the sky with diamonds" because she was so acidotic... get it?... ) I went home to make some dinner and relax. I had been saving some very brown bananas to make banana bread with for the crew on this rotation, and I figured that it was my last chance to make it, so I whipped that together after dinner. I was just taking the last loaf out of the oven when the pager went off... there was an alpaca dystocia (difficult birth) coming in, they'd be there in 30 minutes. So I flew around my apartment like a crazy girl, pulling on scrubs and tossing my things into a bag. I did, miraculously, remember to turn off the oven. I got to the hospital in plenty of time, though, we actually had to wait quite a bit for the alpaca to arrive. Once she got there we determined that she was in fact in pain and distress, but not actually trying to deliver a baby. However, the fact that she was extremely pregnant was the only thing that anyone could find wrong with her. The decision was made to perform a c-section because she was in so much distress, and that way the surgeons could explore the abdomen while she was under and see if there was anything else going on. They pulled a very large, full term, dead fetus from her uterus, that had a broken umbilical cord.... the cord had broken normally, like it does after birth. Quite strange. So we were at the hospital with that until about 1am. I got home, jumped in bed and was probably sleeping by 1:30. At 3am the pager went off again. A goat who we had in ICU as a high risk pregnancy was going into stage 2 labor. So, again, ran around like a crazy person, go to the hospital even before Blair! (quite the accomplishment, I thought) and assisted in the delivery of 3 goat kids. They were not very healthy (on account of their mother's illness), so we had to nurse them quite a bit, stimulating them to breathe and eventually tube feeding them. So that was quite the project. We finished up with them at about 5:45 - almost time to start SOAPing Lucy and the rest of the NICU.... by the time I got out of the building it was about 9:30am. I ran home, jumped into bed and slept until around 2pm (which was fabulous), then got up and went back to the NICU for 4pm-midnight treatment duty. Aaaand now I'm done with the NICU for good. I think I'm gonna miss it. Everyone there is so awesome, the nurses are amazing, and for the most part everyone is a riot and I laugh all day... you kind of have to, the atmosphere can be a little depressing, like working in the cancer ward of a children's hospital. Most of our patients are so young, and so sick, and lots of them don't survive. If you don't have a sense of humor about life and your job, you'd never get through it.
So now on to sports medicine... I've had a bunch of questions about this one, which I think is funny.... "Sport medicine? What kind of sports? Baseball?" It's all horses, and generally we'll focus on lameness and performance issues. It's a 4 week rotation, and we spend a week with outpatient lameness/performance clinic, a week with ultrasound (used frequently to assess tendon and ligament injury in horses' lower limbs), a week in radiology/nuclear scintigraphy (don't ask, I'd spend 4 paragraphs and no one would understand it... but radiology is x-rays), and finally (yay!) a week with the farrier.
Yikes, it's already after 1, and I told Maria I'd go to radiology rounds with her in the morning. Time to sleep. Hurray for a rotation with normal business hours!
It's amazing how fast 2 weeks can go by, if you don't stop moving...
This weekend was slightly crazy, but I definitely needed it, after the slow week I had. I was on call Saturday, and I had a sick 33 hour old Freisian foal come in - it won the prize for low blood pH this season (bad). So I spent the bulk of the day working her up, writing a monster SOAP and otherwise being a space cadet now that I had a geniunely very sick foal to deal with. I learned a ton from her just in the 2 days I've worked on her, and I'm sad she won't be my case anymore.
So after I finished dealing with Lucy (Blair came up with that... after "Lucy in the sky with diamonds" because she was so acidotic... get it?... ) I went home to make some dinner and relax. I had been saving some very brown bananas to make banana bread with for the crew on this rotation, and I figured that it was my last chance to make it, so I whipped that together after dinner. I was just taking the last loaf out of the oven when the pager went off... there was an alpaca dystocia (difficult birth) coming in, they'd be there in 30 minutes. So I flew around my apartment like a crazy girl, pulling on scrubs and tossing my things into a bag. I did, miraculously, remember to turn off the oven. I got to the hospital in plenty of time, though, we actually had to wait quite a bit for the alpaca to arrive. Once she got there we determined that she was in fact in pain and distress, but not actually trying to deliver a baby. However, the fact that she was extremely pregnant was the only thing that anyone could find wrong with her. The decision was made to perform a c-section because she was in so much distress, and that way the surgeons could explore the abdomen while she was under and see if there was anything else going on. They pulled a very large, full term, dead fetus from her uterus, that had a broken umbilical cord.... the cord had broken normally, like it does after birth. Quite strange. So we were at the hospital with that until about 1am. I got home, jumped in bed and was probably sleeping by 1:30. At 3am the pager went off again. A goat who we had in ICU as a high risk pregnancy was going into stage 2 labor. So, again, ran around like a crazy person, go to the hospital even before Blair! (quite the accomplishment, I thought) and assisted in the delivery of 3 goat kids. They were not very healthy (on account of their mother's illness), so we had to nurse them quite a bit, stimulating them to breathe and eventually tube feeding them. So that was quite the project. We finished up with them at about 5:45 - almost time to start SOAPing Lucy and the rest of the NICU.... by the time I got out of the building it was about 9:30am. I ran home, jumped into bed and slept until around 2pm (which was fabulous), then got up and went back to the NICU for 4pm-midnight treatment duty. Aaaand now I'm done with the NICU for good. I think I'm gonna miss it. Everyone there is so awesome, the nurses are amazing, and for the most part everyone is a riot and I laugh all day... you kind of have to, the atmosphere can be a little depressing, like working in the cancer ward of a children's hospital. Most of our patients are so young, and so sick, and lots of them don't survive. If you don't have a sense of humor about life and your job, you'd never get through it.
So now on to sports medicine... I've had a bunch of questions about this one, which I think is funny.... "Sport medicine? What kind of sports? Baseball?" It's all horses, and generally we'll focus on lameness and performance issues. It's a 4 week rotation, and we spend a week with outpatient lameness/performance clinic, a week with ultrasound (used frequently to assess tendon and ligament injury in horses' lower limbs), a week in radiology/nuclear scintigraphy (don't ask, I'd spend 4 paragraphs and no one would understand it... but radiology is x-rays), and finally (yay!) a week with the farrier.
Yikes, it's already after 1, and I told Maria I'd go to radiology rounds with her in the morning. Time to sleep. Hurray for a rotation with normal business hours!