First day of Fourth year!

And I get to goof off until noon! Oh, parasitology didactic, how I love thee...

The powers that be were benevolent and wise and gave us a week off before rotations start. I used mine to do surgery on my dog! He's a farm dog and I can't bring him into town, to keep an eye on him, so hurrah for multiple medical professionals in the family who can help take care of him.

Now, we're not supposed to talk about/photograph/otherwise break client confidentiality on cases from school. However, this is my dog, on my own time, which means I can post as many photos of his splenic mass as I desire. Mwahahaha!

My apologies to the squeamish

Isn't it purty? It was huge, about nine inches across and dangling off the very far end of his spleen. I helped the vet tie off the manymany blood vessels and we just took out the entire spleen. It turned into a somewhat less than sterile field because the incision had to be extended so far we ended up beyond the prepped area, but I've heard "Exposure is everything." And it was really fast. Except the last bit where I closed the subcuticular layer. It was not perhaps the neatest suturing I've done, and I've gotten to look at it every day and go "Man, I wish I had fixed the tension in that one spot better..." But Danny--that's the dog--is doing fine. The first couple of days he was nice and quiet and just lay in the kitchen and waited for his jars of baby food. Now he's feeling better. He's gaining back weight. Yay! It'll still be about a week before there's any strength to his abdominal wall, but we've gotten through the first few days!