I had planned on writing this as I went–updating the masses on what I was doing day in and day out–and perhaps that’s what I’ll fall into as my time becomes more scheduled, but for now, this post will serve as the synopsis of my first two week rotation: General Surgery.
This rotation focuses on the basic surgical procedures of spaying and castrating dogs and cats and various other small procedures, like lumpectomies or feline declaws. It’s a pretty self-contained service, with our students running the anesthesia and performing the surgeries, as well as dealing with the clients, etc., so it was a great place to start; got us all up to speed (as up to speed as we’ll be for a while) on the teaching hospital procedures and such.
We hit the ground running, too, with three patients in at 9:30am on Monday, May 5, after our short one-hour orientation. Our rotation had six students, five from my class and one from another vet school doing his clinical year up with us, so we split into pairs with one student as the surgeon and one as the anesthetist. Not quite awake or ready, or perhaps still too apprehensive, I chose to be anesthetist, allowing my very good friend K on this rotation to do her first feline ovariohysterectomy (cat spay). It went smoothly, if slowly, and we soon realized that unless we started becoming flooded with patients, we’d have a pretty laid back first rotation.
On Tuesday we go to a nearby town’s Humane Society shelter to do anywhere from 12-18 spays/neuters. The drive out there is about 2 hours, so we had to be at school at 6:30am–that was rough–but we stopped for a small breakfast along the way. I did my first canine neuter and another canine spay that morning, shoved down my lunch and was anesthetist for a feline spay and neuter. We stopped for dinner on the way home, and started to really get to know our clinician and technician, as well as our classmates. With a pretty large vet school class, you can make it through three years without necessarily getting to meet each and everyone, so this year will be an interesting experience.
On Wednesday, we had another three patients, so the anesthetists from Monday swapped with their partners, and my friend K served as the anesthetist for my 77-pound female Weimereiner who had been used as a breeding bitch before being adopted by some great clients, the people who brought her in that morning. The procedure was long and mildly frustrating as I had to make a pretty long incision comparative to my classmates with a tiny dachshund and a cat to spay, due to the turgidity of the reproductive tract and our worry about possible complications. Luckily there were none, but my classmates both finished before I did, and my clinician, I felt, was being a bit unfair by hurrying me along as I was suturing the body wall. My friend K could tell I was frustrated and helped to calm me down and the procedure was great, but it took a long time for the dog to recover after being under anesthesia for so long, so we had to sit with her until her temperature returned to normal. [It's difficult for animals to thermoregulate while under anesthesia due to the depression in their consciousness.] When we extubated her, we saw that she had some mucus in the lungs, so we started her on antibiotics to combat the upper respiratory tract infection. I had to track down a clinician to sign the prescription (since ours had gone home for the day… at 3pm) and then pill my patient. The only thing that kept me from losing my temper (something I absolutely cannot do on clinics!) was the fact that I knew that the next day I would be getting on a plane to go on perhaps the most frivolous but most necessary journey of my life!
My boyfriend lives far far away across the pond, so visiting him is a luxury that I am rarely afforded. I’ve only been there once–last May-June–and I know I won’t be able to go again until I graduate, so I had been scheming about surprising him in our “week” break between third and fourth year until he told me about two formal events (apparently people in England get dressed up a lot fancier a lot more often than we Americans do) in May that I had gone to the year before when I was living there with him but wouldn’t be able to attend this year. I began scheming about surprising him for one of the events, but do you know how hard it is to book a secret flight, some how finagle tickets to an extremely exclusive party and manage to get time off clinics all at once? It’s pretty f-ing hard, so when we were on Spring Break in Turkey, I told him, and we began arranging the trip together. He, being the amazing guy he is, split the plane ticket with me, and we began making arrangements. Due to some sort of luck, the now-Drs./then-4vms were graduating on Thursday, May 8, so our rotation had nothing scheduled on that day, so I could leave Thursday morning after I checked out my patient. That Thursday, I managed to finish packing, show up at school by 7:45am, check on my patient, medicate my patient, check out my patient (after a few laughs with her owners about the possibility of a veterinary tummy tuck to correct all that pendulous mammary tissue that comes with being a mommy), go home and take my own dog for a walk, go to the dermatologist at 10am, get three moles removed, get a pedicure, go home to eat lunch, collect my things and get to the teeny tiny airport we have locally to stand in line for 30 minutes watching an idiot check his dog.
Now, you can check a dog… or any pet animal for that matter, but it’s something that takes some knowledge and some time, and this poor boy had neither of those. The flight was at 12:50pm, and I arrived at 12:15, and I know that’s cutting it close, but this airport doesn’t even open security until 30 minutes before boarding time, so being there the requisite hour early is pretty much a waste of your time. There were 5 other people ahead of me in line, all checking in on American Airlines, all for the same flight (since there are only three flights out a day, each separated by a convenient 6 hours). The boy standing at the counter with the dog crate had to be prompted for the veterinary certificate [Pets need a health certificate to fly; airlines are pretty good about letting you know what you need, and your vet should be, too.], the food instructions, the food and then finally, the pet, as it turned out that his girlfriend was sitting about 20 feet away with the small chocolate lab puppy. It’s amazing I hadn’t noticed her earlier, as she was constantly nagging about this and that, none of which should have been left to be dealt with 20 minutes before the plane was scheduled to take off. Needless to say, there were some stressed people in line around me, and I can only thank my lucky stars that our airport is small enough to ensure that our plane didn’t leave without us. I had a long lay-over before my flight to London, and when I arrived in England, it was Friday morning, and I’d barely gotten any rest, but I soldiered through it, and made it to Oxford where I met my boyfriend. We thoroughly enjoyed our Friday together by stopping in at the Oxford Botanical Gardens to see Lyra and Will’s bench, as described in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass. We enjoyed two meals on North Parade–a baguette for lunch in the park and some Indian food (since I can’t get it where I live) that night for dinner. Mmm… that cheese nan and lamb korma… that’s what I dream about when I think about moving to an actual city some day. We swung by to pick up our “tickets” for the ball the next day, and called it a night after streaming some great episodes of The Office (US, not UK).
The next day we walked around in a field for a while (not kidding) after a great Turkish breakfast, and then got ready for the big event! There would be a lot to talk about regarding this event,–like how wunderbar everyone looked and how great it was to see everyone again–but I think most of it’s already been said, so suffice it to say that those Scholars certainly know how to push an agenda, and even when it’s one with which I agree, I’m not very agreeable when the rum runs out.
On Sunday I went home. Flying home from England is, after all, an all-day affair.
Monday morning bright and early I had great intentions to ride my bike to school, but as usual with the weather the way it’s been, I was forced to drive (with gas at $3.62/gallon). I was hoping that our schedule would turn out the way that it had last week, and I could kind of sit Monday out (as anesthetist) but no such luck. Instead, I found myself as the only student on the rotation with a patient coming, so I got to spay a cat with all my colleagues in the room, watching. Not really watching, actually, but waiting with baited breath for me to finish my 1 hr 25 minute spay as we were doing a declaw (onychectomy) after I finished the spay, and each of us would get the opportunity to participate. The day was short, though, as felines tend to wake up from their ketamine and inhalant anesthesia much more quickly than canines from propofol and inhalants, so we were home early once again, and I was able to unpack and sleep.
Tuesday found us once again on the road to the Humane Society, where I spayed two TINY dogs (pediatric spays are astonishingly different from mature spays). Wednesday was boring, with once again only one case coming in. Since I was leading the group with spays, I just sat and watched, but Thursday and Friday were full days!
Thursday was another shelter animal day–this time the local shelter–where they seemed to have a plethora of adorable pups needing neutering. I got to do a cryptorchid surgery and a canine castration and canine spay.
Friday we were doing surgery on the feral cats caught around the area by our feral cat alliance. I did my very first cat neuter and decided that I’m going to open a clinic for big friendly dogs neuters and already-anesthetized cat castrations. 
Our clinician had rounds with us and told us that we were one of her “most favoritest” groups in the last five years she’s been doing this, and that she hopes the rest of our class lives up to us.
I hope I live up to that kind of praise on the rest of my rotations!
