Shelter Medicine, and other stuff
So yes, lots of stuff this week.
We began Shelter Med, and boy... I love it! It's basically surgery all day... and when you're not in surgery, you're doing anesthesia for someone else doing surgery, which isn't a big deal and it gives us practice with catheter placement, intubation, knocking down and of course, filling out those dreaded anesthesia forms. But LOTS of surgery time and I LOVE it! I try to get as many cases as I can without being a total hog about it. This is what I've done so far:
Monday: kitten spay
Tuesday: cryptorchid neuter (testicle in caudal abdomen) and regular puppy neuter
Wednesday: adult dog neuter (lots of pulling!), adult dog spay (veeery bloody!!! Your quintessential "fat lab" spay)
Thursday, feral cat day: 2 cat neuters, 2 cat spays (one of them being VERY VERY preggers)
It's been great. Basically the day starts with you checking on the patients you operated on the day prior, taking TPR and making sure incisions look good. Then you start physical exams on patients you are going to do that day. All the PE's are done at once with everybody in the group. Then you start calculating pre-meds and induction drugs, and start pre-meding and prepping surgery tables for the patients. By the time everything is ready, the animals are ready to be knocked down. The anesthetist places the catheter, gives the induction drug, intubates and other things like shaving and scrubbing to prep the site. The surgeon obviously helps at first and then leaves to scrub in. Then they come in and do the surgery, wake the animal up, check temp and put it in the recovery room. Then the next person (usually the person doing anesthesia) swaps out to become the surgeon. The supervising vet, Dr. Hill, is SO calm and patient with us, even though we ask the same questions over and over again and sometimes do stupid things (like I did, I cut completely off midline because I mistook another area for the linea alba-- oooooops). He's super nice and he's hilarious too, we can joke with him and everything. The whole atmosphere is completely relaxed and everyone is having a good time. I feel bad cos one of our groupmates, Gretchen, has been gone because her dad died 2 weeks ago. She would have really felt at ease during this rotation and it would have been good for her because she doesn't like it when the supervising clinicians stress her out (case in point, "Miss Sunshine" from Community Practice), as dubbed by Nick. Oh well.... she'll go through the rotation eventually. Today was Feral Cat Day/Dental Day, and we got to work with Dr. Flores again (she's always a blast and we /definitely/ feel at ease joking around with her), as well as Dr. Birkhold, the chief veterinarian of the shelter. She is also super patient and calm and doesn't mind talking you through difficult points of the surgery (ie: re-orienting myself when I incised a cat abdomen today to find uterine horns almost as thick as my wrist in there, no lie). So far I LOVE clinics, CP was great and Shelter Med is even better. This is 10x better than waking up early to sit in the classroom for 8 hours a day. We can TOUCH animals! We can DO SURGERY on them! Amazing. I actually sorta feel like a doctor, haha.
Anyway, yes.... Shelter Med is awesome. Tomorrow we don't do surgeries but we're going to have a short behavior lecture from Cynthia (she of puppy class with Debby), and then we're going to watch a few behavior evals... then that's it really. Friday afternoon, free! I'm glad because I reallly reallllllly need to clean the rest of the condo, badly. And I was thinking of stopping at Meijer and picking up some nice plants/flowers to plant outside.... yeah, with homeownership comes the responsibility of making it look nice. I am certainly no gardener but I will give it my best shot, haha. OH yeah, another good thing about tomorrow: We get to go in at 10! Sweeeeeet. So I can actually wait up for Sean tonight (that is, if I don't fall asleep before then).
AND new Grey's Anatomy is on tonight. SUPER excited for that.
So all in all, it's been a good week. I was able to also get my case log from CP in on time, AND make a pit stop at the Chinese market to get Chinese broccoli--- so I had Judy's rice-cake stir fry two nights in a row, mmmmmmm. I also ran with Bentley twice, and made it to the gym (albeit early) twice. And cleaned the kitchen. Can you smell the productivity?
I'm kind of a dork and am desperately waiting for my MAC 15-pan palettes to come in the mail so I can de-pot all my new eyeshadows, re-bought from that whole car invasion fiasco late last month. I can't wait to try them! It's the only time I can ever be creative, haha.
It's been such nice weather out this week. Too bad it rained last weekend and I think it's not gonna be nice this weekend-- well at least Saturday. It would be nice to actually do something outside with Sean, so we'll see if Sunday has good weather. Hopefully.
Anyway, I think that's all for now. My latest thing is sitting on the computer and playing Text Twist until my neck starts to hurt. So I think I'll do that until Grey's, hehe.
We began Shelter Med, and boy... I love it! It's basically surgery all day... and when you're not in surgery, you're doing anesthesia for someone else doing surgery, which isn't a big deal and it gives us practice with catheter placement, intubation, knocking down and of course, filling out those dreaded anesthesia forms. But LOTS of surgery time and I LOVE it! I try to get as many cases as I can without being a total hog about it. This is what I've done so far:
Monday: kitten spay
Tuesday: cryptorchid neuter (testicle in caudal abdomen) and regular puppy neuter
Wednesday: adult dog neuter (lots of pulling!), adult dog spay (veeery bloody!!! Your quintessential "fat lab" spay)
Thursday, feral cat day: 2 cat neuters, 2 cat spays (one of them being VERY VERY preggers)
It's been great. Basically the day starts with you checking on the patients you operated on the day prior, taking TPR and making sure incisions look good. Then you start physical exams on patients you are going to do that day. All the PE's are done at once with everybody in the group. Then you start calculating pre-meds and induction drugs, and start pre-meding and prepping surgery tables for the patients. By the time everything is ready, the animals are ready to be knocked down. The anesthetist places the catheter, gives the induction drug, intubates and other things like shaving and scrubbing to prep the site. The surgeon obviously helps at first and then leaves to scrub in. Then they come in and do the surgery, wake the animal up, check temp and put it in the recovery room. Then the next person (usually the person doing anesthesia) swaps out to become the surgeon. The supervising vet, Dr. Hill, is SO calm and patient with us, even though we ask the same questions over and over again and sometimes do stupid things (like I did, I cut completely off midline because I mistook another area for the linea alba-- oooooops). He's super nice and he's hilarious too, we can joke with him and everything. The whole atmosphere is completely relaxed and everyone is having a good time. I feel bad cos one of our groupmates, Gretchen, has been gone because her dad died 2 weeks ago. She would have really felt at ease during this rotation and it would have been good for her because she doesn't like it when the supervising clinicians stress her out (case in point, "Miss Sunshine" from Community Practice), as dubbed by Nick. Oh well.... she'll go through the rotation eventually. Today was Feral Cat Day/Dental Day, and we got to work with Dr. Flores again (she's always a blast and we /definitely/ feel at ease joking around with her), as well as Dr. Birkhold, the chief veterinarian of the shelter. She is also super patient and calm and doesn't mind talking you through difficult points of the surgery (ie: re-orienting myself when I incised a cat abdomen today to find uterine horns almost as thick as my wrist in there, no lie). So far I LOVE clinics, CP was great and Shelter Med is even better. This is 10x better than waking up early to sit in the classroom for 8 hours a day. We can TOUCH animals! We can DO SURGERY on them! Amazing. I actually sorta feel like a doctor, haha.
Anyway, yes.... Shelter Med is awesome. Tomorrow we don't do surgeries but we're going to have a short behavior lecture from Cynthia (she of puppy class with Debby), and then we're going to watch a few behavior evals... then that's it really. Friday afternoon, free! I'm glad because I reallly reallllllly need to clean the rest of the condo, badly. And I was thinking of stopping at Meijer and picking up some nice plants/flowers to plant outside.... yeah, with homeownership comes the responsibility of making it look nice. I am certainly no gardener but I will give it my best shot, haha. OH yeah, another good thing about tomorrow: We get to go in at 10! Sweeeeeet. So I can actually wait up for Sean tonight (that is, if I don't fall asleep before then).
AND new Grey's Anatomy is on tonight. SUPER excited for that.
So all in all, it's been a good week. I was able to also get my case log from CP in on time, AND make a pit stop at the Chinese market to get Chinese broccoli--- so I had Judy's rice-cake stir fry two nights in a row, mmmmmmm. I also ran with Bentley twice, and made it to the gym (albeit early) twice. And cleaned the kitchen. Can you smell the productivity?
I'm kind of a dork and am desperately waiting for my MAC 15-pan palettes to come in the mail so I can de-pot all my new eyeshadows, re-bought from that whole car invasion fiasco late last month. I can't wait to try them! It's the only time I can ever be creative, haha.
It's been such nice weather out this week. Too bad it rained last weekend and I think it's not gonna be nice this weekend-- well at least Saturday. It would be nice to actually do something outside with Sean, so we'll see if Sunday has good weather. Hopefully.
Anyway, I think that's all for now. My latest thing is sitting on the computer and playing Text Twist until my neck starts to hurt. So I think I'll do that until Grey's, hehe.