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!

Surgery: Anatomy, Art

Today for surgery class (i.e. sit in lecture hearing the basics once, so that next year we cannot say things like, "I've never heard of ___, how do you expect me to know about it?") we're covering anatomy.

So far: anatomy is important.

Anatomy has important implications for suture. Last week we went over suture, so in theory this all makes perfect sense, at any rate makes more sense than enzymology in clin path. In all fairness, the clin path professors do a terrific job, and I'm sure by the time we have an exam, enzymology will make more sense than whatever the next topic is going to be.

Anatomy has been occupying me outside of lecture recently. An artist friend of mine discovered anatomy last year by way of a life drawing class. All of a sudden her sketches of people included such innovative things as triceps. (This year I'm going to be taking the same class, actually, although for different reasons--my drawing skills need help. I know where the muscles are, I'm just lousy at delineating them.) She would like to now spread the joy of knowledge, so we're working on an anatomy workshop for fantasy artists. It will have skulls. If I could, I would bring in a horse leg with intact suspensory apparatus, but that's probably a bit beyond the scope of a one-hour talk that is starting out with "This is a skeleton..."

Called In

I got done at the clinic around midnight. The clean-up was easier once I found the second autoclave was full of freshly sterilized instruments, meaning I didn't have to run a load myself. On the other hand, the drill defeated me. I wiped all the blood off it, but the mysterious combination of pulling and twisting necessary to disassemble it eluded me.

Around eight o'clock a newly spayed dog had dehisced, and I had gotten a call, "Can you come in?" Seeing as I had been still standing in the surgery ward, I guess technically the answer was "no". Anyway, it was a 4th year's surgery dog from earlier in the day. The resident was delighted to get to do a surgery. It wasn't a huge undertaking, though. She was worried, in fact, that maybe she'd mistakenly called for surgery on a dog that was fine. But to her relief (if not the 4th year's), the student had sutured a layer of fat instead of the linea alba. So yay, there was something to fix!

I don't usually meet the dogs before they're anesthetized. This one was a very thin Rottweiler, from the rescue group. She seemed very sweet--granted, she had just woken up a few hours ago and was sedated again already.

So that was last night! I tormented the other student techs by telling them about it today. No one really likes to hear that someone got called in--it implies there might be a trend!
However, aside from huge amount of cleaning I ended up doing, it was a pretty decent experience.

Not that I want to repeat it every time I'm on call.