Foal Sitting: Dummies

It is 5: 15 am and I have 45 mins left of my 12 hour night shift. We have been foal sitting a pathetic dummy since Friday at 1am - taking shifts to sit with him. I managed to get yesterday off (awesomeness) to surprise Arthur at Summer Camp. When I got here today, I finally saw that there has been progress with this dude. He needs to hurry up and turn into normal because he is reaching the max amount of $$ the owners agreed to spend. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he hurries it up and starts nursing on his own soon. There is also a baby (dummy) cria in the large animal ward. It is ridiculous looking. I was able to get it to nurse tonight, so there is hope for that little creature. Dummy foals that are hypoxic during birth. They get cerebral edema and can't function normally. Their full recovery is based on how much the owners are able to give the nursing care as it is a full time 24 hours/day job. Usually they do make a full recovery if you can manage any seizure activity and make sure they get the proper nutrition. This dude is on IV fluids, O2 and a nasoesophageal feeding tube that we put mamma's milk in (after milking her first of course) Luckily the U of I has extra cheap labor (aka vet students). And back to counting down the minutes...

Equine: day 1

Long. Day. Started at 8am and ended at 7pm. Back tomorrow at 5:45. And this is how the next 4 weeks will go. I teamed up with Chelsea on a mamma, foal mini pony combo. He is ridiculous. Suspected pneumonia. We needed an x-ray of his chest, so how do you get a foal to the imaging ward? Put a lead on mamma! He followed right behind. Rads looked great! So the little dude and his mamma will probably be going home tomorrow.
Another cool patient is the HUGEST horse I have ever seen! Mare who's baby ended up hemorrhaging through her umbillicus and did not make it. Mamma then became pretty ill. We had the foal on necropsy a couple of weeks ago. Sad, but mamma seems to be doing well. She is going to be going home at some point soon. I think that if I extend my arm straight into the air, she would still be taller. pretty amazing creature.

Cryptosporidiosis

I'm finally over the crypto curse. I'm at about 99% normal again. Poor Arthur ended up catching it too. The incubation period was for about 6 or 7 days. Super strange. I was never diagnosed with it - it's a tricky bug to see, but every symptom I had was by the book. It probably came from the calves at the Round Barn. They seem to have everything right now, and it turned out that my first few necropsy animals were calves from over there. I don't think I have ever had anything like it in my life, and I probably ended up a few pounds lighter as a result. I was moderately dehydrated, so I drank 60 oz of Gatorade and 60 oz of H2O in one evening. That seemed to set me back on track. Lots of fluid! ugh!

Anyway, I'm pretty sure it is officially over. :D
Hopefully this is the last of the zoonotic diseases I'll catch this year..... HOPEFULLY!

Cytology

I started my last week of Diagnostics today. For the last week, I am on cytology - reading all kinds of slides with cells. It is way slow, but I will admit that I was getting tired of the necropsy floor. It is hard work and I was covered in blood every day. It will be nice to NOT be covered with bodily fluids this week.

I'm having a little anxiety of starting equine next week, but I'm trying to focus on and make the most out of this week. My life and free time will be totally gone 1 week from now...

At least I'm not crapping my brains out anymore (like all of last week). I must have caught something on the floor. Then I passed it to Arthur. He stayed home sick today. McKinley found nothing when I submitted a sample. I will tell you that I definitely did not have "nothing". Who knows...

Today I saw some various neoplasias and inflammation - will be great for practice someday.

On call tonight. Just got word that some calf parts are being dropped off in about a half hour. Guess who gets to take them and put them in the cooler..... ***THIS GIRL***

...and then I'm going to make dinner! YUM!

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Reflecting on the past 2 weeks

So the last 2 weeks have been really amazing. I have 2 more weeks to go in this rotation. Just when I think I've seen it all, another case comes in that drops my jaw to the floor. I would never publish all the gross details, but I have officially worked on most animals. We even had 2 frogs come in on Friday from one of the local zoos.

Highlights from the week (there are really no such things as highlights on the necropsy floor):
We discovered a perforation in the stomach of a super spoiled dog from Chicagoland. Pretty sad story, but it feels good to know that they will at least know what happened.
A cat with FIP. FIP is a sick sick disease.
Racehorse with neuro signs.
Cow with mastitis.

As part of this rotation, I worked form midnight-6am this past Saturday in the large animal ICU. There were a bunch of horses including 4 sets of mares and foals. In the farms ward, there were 2 ridiculous goats and a male sheep. The time went quick because we have to go around every hour to check on everyone. The foals are incredibly cute, and goats are pretty sassy in general. I was totally fine until around 4:30 and I started to feel a little wiped out. It was a good intro, though to the next rotation. I'll be on equine and (one of my 4weeks) will have to spend a week doing exactly what I had to the other night. I think if I can get into a night routine, it should not be all that bad.

Arthur was down here this weekend (since I had to go into the clinic on Sat). He is going to be my rock this year.

First week down.

First week of clinics (A1 Block: Diagnostics).
Overall this week was awesome. Diagnostics is a good way to ease into clinics. We start every day at 8am and are usually done by 3pm (depending on how many bodies we have to work on of course).

It was also the last week for the old 4th year students (class of 2011). They are over it and pretty apathetic. Though pretty helpful, you could tell they are ready to be done with clinics. I think there will be a little more excitement this week with them gone, since we are all pretty optimistic at this point in the game.

Cool cases this past week:
a few calves with scours (probably E. coli)
pig with whipworms
a cat with eosinophilic infiltration in almost all of its organs
a few other cats
foal
foal with half birthed mare probably the coolest just due to size. Courtney and Julia did a beautiful job on them.
goat
ewe with picture perfect ileal torsion (just like in our textbooks)

Diagnostics is pretty gross, but it is a great review of diseases and it is fun to have a "mystery" that we have to try and find an answer to.

Overall: great week. Cake schedule. Great residents and pathologists.

I had the weekend off of clinics: Taylor's shower. Arthur's grandpa's 90th b-day. NFL draft.