Huzzah, no more cows!

So this was probably my worst week of clinics yet. Monday was terrible because I had made myself sick from crying all weekend and we had to go to DPS (or as I call it, the concentration camp for calves). We had to dehorn 106 calves. Thats right. One hundred and six. Luckily we had two dehorners and by the end of it we had a system going that was working pretty well. By the end of the day I was ready to just lay down and sleep for like 4 days.

Tuesday was a short day. We traveled to NF Holsteins, a wonderful operation with happy, clean calves. Over on the adult cow side of things we got to see a cow with unilateral femoral nerve damage. She had atrophy of just her quadricep muscles and couldn't really bear weight on the limb. Our guess is that she slipped or was otherwise injured, its really the only explanation. We were back and out of the vet school by 1. I did a little happy dance.

On Wednesday things started taking a turn for the worse. Not only did we have to go to DPS again I was starting to feel sick. Like wanted to throw up and keel over from pain sick. I think it was when we started doing necropsies on some of the dead calves that I almost lost it. It felt like food poisoning only I couldn't actually vomit, I was just super nauseous. I don't know which is worse. Somehow I survived the day. It lasted forever. Every time we thought we were done they would bring us something else to look at. My favorite was the cow that was 7 months into lactation and her milk production was going down so they thought she had an LDA. Right. Really she was just naturally drying off but these people apparently wanted to suck every last ounce of milk out of her. Then we watched a parturition with dead twin calves. Then we had to go back to the calf field to bleed another calf and figure out some 'mystery medicine' they had. Finally we left and when I got home I spent the rest of the night in the fetal position in my bed from pain.

Thursday. Abdominal pain got worse. Had to go to the DRU to work with calves but there were only a few. Then we rechecked my LDA cow that we did surgery on last week. She was doing so poorly. On rectal they felt large masses that they thought were fibrin clots. So we decided to take her back to the school to euthanize her and submit her for necropsy. It took 40 minutes and 260 mL of euthanasia solution to kill this cow. Her blood pressure was so low and her vessels were so weak that every time we got a bit of the pink juice in her the vein would blow and she couldn't get it circulating. We almost had to do an intracardiac stick. No joke. But finally she passed. On necropsy they found that there was an abscess under her incision site and the abomasum had displaced again. It had become adhered to the left body wall and big fibrin clots had formed. There was no saving her, we did the right thing.

So today my abdominal pain got way worse. Luckily we didn't have to go to any farms and it was just a half day. I took myself to the ER and after some IV anti-nausea medication, a CT scan and some bloodwork the doctor informed me that I have a functional ileus. Awesome. He didn't want to give me anything to force my gut to start moving because I was already in so much pain. He sent me home with some miralax which supposedly will help convince my GI tract to start moving again. Thank goodness I'm going on vacation next. I think I need one.

I wish I couldn't cry

So this weekend blew the big one. Lets begin at the beginning.

Friday.
Party sucked, didn't end up going out. And then Damien acted like a dick, as usual. A bunch of my friends and I were all supposed to go and get tattoos together once my best friend's boyfriend said it was okay (don't ask). Well, he finally gave the go ahead and we were going to go, it was just a matter of when. The thing is, I can't get a tattoo, its a religious thing, I just can't do it. But, I really wanted to go with my friends when they got one because I was always curious about the experience and thought it would be fun. Then I found out at the party that they already decided when they were going and not only didn't tell me but now Damien was invited. I asked if I could still come and Damien asked if I was getting a tattoo. I of course said no because of my religion and he said, "then you can't come. This trip is only for people getting a tattoo. Why are you being such a pussy and not getting a tattoo?" Needless to say, now I feel completely uncomfortable and don't really want to go and feel unwelcome. Damien crossed a line calling me a pussy because my religious beliefs preclude me from getting a tattoo. And the worst part, no one stood up for me. Not one of my friends. That sucked. A lot.

Then my best friend reveals to me that she has a crush on Damien (she has a boyfriend, by the way). wtf. I hate that kid, she knows he's an asshole, but she said he "has his moments." No really, he doesn't. He's just an asshole.

Saturday.
Despite telling everyone that I wanted to tailgate with them before the game even though I didn't have a ticket, I was left out yet again. No one called me and I couldn't get a hold of anyone. I found out right before the game that my friends had tailgated all afternoon and just forgot to call me. Well, that sucked but I'll get over it. So I watched the game with my best friend, Kimmi, and we hung out and had a decent time. Then Kimmi's phone rang. She was giggling and then told whoever it was that she would call them later. I asked if that was her dad (it sounded like she was talking to him) and she said, "no, it was James."

Wait . . . what? Surely it could not be the James that I was dating earlier and who was a moron and dropped me like a hot cake because he didn't want a relationship? (Side note: I found out later that James made it a habit of hitting on every single girl in the vet school and being an all around douche bag.) So I said, "James who?"

"James R."

Yup, same James. Crap. So it turns out they've been friends for a while and they hang out, just the two of them, a lot. He was calling her because he was lonely. wtf. Then she showed me her phone and I saw that he's been texting her with suggestive messages a lot (just like he did with me). She seems to see no problem with this friendship. I feel kind of hurt. Kimmi was one of my best friends, we've been through a lot together and I've been there for her during some pretty rough times. I would have thought that she would have been like 'hey, this guy was an ass to my best friend, maybe he's not such a nice guy.' Apparently not. I feel betrayed. Maybe I'm over-reacting but of all the people I know I would have never expected this from her.

Sunday.
I talk to my mom about everything that went on this weekend and somehow she turns it around and blames it on me. I proceeded to cry for a long time.

I hate this bullshit. I wish either people didn't suck so much or that I didn't care so much.

No one ever said anything about blogging drunk

We partied tonight. In our own special way. My friends and I were supposed to go downtown and dance and have a grand old time but we decided to stop by the house where three of our classmates live before venturing out. A half hour stop turned into a long ordeal. Long story short: we never made it to any club downtown, one of my friends/classmate got into a big fight with a guy in our class, and I wasted the wearing of a perfectly hot shirt to just hang out with some peeps. Not completely true. See, the guy my friend was fighting with, also happens to be the guy in our class that I have a major crush on. Only problem is that if he knew I liked him I think he would run in the opposite direction. I'm just not one of "those" girls. You know, the popular and pretty ones. He's a member of our "fraternity". I use the quotes because its not a real frat, just a clique of people in our class that I don't actually belong to but hang out on the fringe of, kind of like the 3rd to last person that gets picked for the kickball team if that makes any sense.

Who am I kidding? Boys are stupid. Maybe I'll feel different tomorrow when I've slept off the alcohol.

Hey now, we may be smart but we vet students are awesome at consuming our alcohol.

A cow's life is not for me

So oncology has come and gone. The second week was rather uneventful we had only a few appointments because the clinicians were lecturing that week. I really had a lot of fun on that rotation. The techs were awesome and although being the only student was hard I liked the one-on-one attention. Learning about chemo was pretty cool too. Its amazing what we're doing in veterinary medicine these days. Whats even more amazing is how well the animals tolerate it. Animals do so much better on chemotherapy than humans, its crazy. We can't cure cancer but we sure as hell can make it go away for a while. Some of our patients are going on two years in clinical remission of lymphoma. It'll catch up to them some day but those two years are like an extra 15 for a person. Its amazing.

I've moved onto the food animal and reproductive medicine rotation (FAMS and we lovingly call it). I don't want to kill myself yet but I'm getting there. I was late the first day and it was Dr. Ram that was there to greet me. Dr. Ram has no sense of humor and his first words to me were: "We start on time here." Well crap, there goes that grade. Truth is, they never told us what time we had to be there and my friends all told me we didn't have to get there until 8:30. I tried to get there by 8:00 just in case but traffic was horrible so I didn't get there until 8:05. I felt like an ass. Oh well, no sense in beating myself up over the past right?

The field trips on FAMS have been . . . . interesting. Its hot, there's a lot of cow crap, and the smell of the silage makes me want to vomit. But it could be worse. The residents are all pretty cool. We joke around a lot and have a good time. My first day we did an LDA surgery and I got to scrub in. It was awesome. I had my arm inside the cow and was feeling the abomasum and everything. Although the face I'm making is less than flattering. They even let me close the incision. Unfortunately when we came back today the cow was looking very dehydrated and she had a 'ping' on her left side again. Even though we did a really solid omentopexy she may have displaced again. We'll recheck her in a few days to see what we need to do next.

The calves have been both the best and the worst part. One dairy farm we went to yesterday had this field full of hutches almost as far as you could see. The hutches were small and dirty and the little roofs barely gave the calves enough shade. They all looked small and sick. I almost cried when I saw it. Many of the calves had pneumonia and I know that last month a lot of their calves died from heat stress. We took blood from about 60 calves to test their total protein and 30% of them were at an inadequate level, only 40% were in a good solid range. The calves we saw today were in a better situation. They were in a clean and dry area with sand, a barn to shade them and plenty of fans to keep them cool. They seemed happier (if a calf can be happy). A lot of them were jumping up and down and wanting to play, it was very cute. We had to dehorn some of them. I didn't like that. Not because it was cruel, they couldn't feel it because we blocked them, but because I was terrified of missing and burning part of their face off. We used this tool that gets really hot and burns the cornual epithelium. Not something to mess around with. But all in all today was a better experience than yesterday with the calves.

Today we also got to lance an abscess. Finally, after months of being on clinics I got to see some good 'ol pus!! A cow were were removing sutures on had a big lump on her neck. We stuck a needle in it and pus just started dripping out. Dr. Mendle lanced it and pus just started to pour out of her neck. It was amazing. I got video of the whole thing. Then, when we thought there was nothing more that could possible be in there, Dr. Mendle pulled out this:
Just a gianourmous thing of fibrin. It was amazing. I couldn't believe my eyes. That poor cow must feel so much better now, I can't imagine having that much pus in me just stretching out the skin. It was so satisfying to take it all out of her.

So I have one more week of FAMS and then vacation. I can make it through one more week. I hope.

Oncology . . . cancer is keeping me busy

So I've been the only student on the oncology rotation this past week. Its been crazy. I've been staying mainly with the surgery side of the department for this week, next week I'll focus more on medicine. Its a great rotation, everyone is super nice and the department head, Dr. Miles, is hilarious. I walked in on him dancing to the song 'Gettin' Jiggy Wit It' the other day. I almost died of laughter. The cases are crazy. Some of these clients have been told there is no help for their pet and then they come here and we give them an option. A women came in with her dog, Tabasco, who had just been diagnosed with osteosarcomma. The dog has bad hips and stifles so the owner didn't want to do a limb amputation. We offered her stereotactic radiosurgery to treat the cancer. Turns out we're the only place in the world offering that for animals. How cool is that?

I had another crazy cat lady this week. Well, really, a crazy cat couple. The husband was scary. Dr. Fray likened him to Norman Bates. No really, he might murder us if the cat dies. The cat has a liver mass. Most likely its benign but the owners want us to take it out. Fair enough. Trying to get a history from these people though was like pulling teeth. I somehow managed to get the history of the cat's entire family. Don't even think about asking how many cats they have, they don't even know. The best part was when the wife taught me a song I had to sing to the cat when he got his asthma medicine. The entire oncology department has been trying to get me to sing it. Not going to happen. Later in the week I had to call them with the results of their ultrasound and fine needle aspirate (which the woman tried to tell me was the same thing as a biopsy . . . not so much). That was when I screwed up. She asked if we were going to do a clotting profile and cross matching on the cat prior to surgery. I said that I didn't think so but that we could do it if it would make her more comfortable. Apparently she was really upset by this and told the referring vet that she was losing confidence in us. Turns out, I found out later, that we always do a clotting profile on liver lobectomies. Luckily my clinicians weren't too upset with me because they think she's crazy anyway. I'm dreading when this cat comes in on Wednesday for surgery.

We had another dog come in, Rocky, who is a doberman with an oral sarcomma that takes up the front of his mandible. The other vets they went to see said they couldn't do anything for it. Our surgeons looked at him and told them that we could help them. Granted, he'll have to relearn how to eat but he'll be sarcomma free . . . at least for a little while. Its a very aggressive tumor and will most likely show up again in some form. It should be an awesome surgery, unfortunately I won't get to scrub in on it. Oh well, such is life I guess.

Our surgery day this week was ridiculous. We started off with Bart, who was supposed to have a liver lobectomy. Well, when we got in we realized the mass was too close to the hilus and next to some nasty large vessels. So we opted for not trying to kill the dog and tried to remove as much of the mass as possible without bleeding the dog out. Despite all our efforts he still bled a lot and needed a transfusion, he made it though. We still have him because he decided that peeing on his incision was a good idea and now has an infection. He's still having trouble with the whole peeing outside thing, which makes taking care of him kind of a pain in the ass. Plus, he won't eat for us. I think he needs to go home at this point. He'll eat there and his incision looks 100% better.

So after that surgery, which took longer than expected, and getting Bart settled into ICU, Dr. Cane told me to grab something to eat quick because we had to get started on the next surgery. I grabbed a bag of chips and was halfway through before Dr. Cane and Dr. Fray started moving into the OR. So much for lunch. So we started the next crazy surgery. Poor little Dexter had a peripheral nerve sheath tumor on his sciatic nerve that extended up to nerves L5, L6, L7, and S1. So we had to do a coxofemoral disarticulation, hemipelvectomy, and hemilaminectomy in order to remove the leg and the nerves at their origin on the spinal cord. It was such a cool surgery, they even let me use the cautery to transect the muscles of the hind leg! Dexter actually did really well after surgery. He recovered like a champ and was running around on his three little legs like nothing ever happened. It was awesome.

Not everything is so happy about oncology though. Not surprising. Molly is this sweet cat with these owners that are just the nicest people. She came in to start a new protocol to treat her GI lymphoma and hemangiosarcomma (very rare in kitties). We did an ultrasound before treatment and unfortunately found that her hemangiosarcomma grew despite the treatment we had been doing. Since HSAs are such resistant tumors we decided that it would not be in the best interest of the cat. We had to tell the owners that it was now about end of life care and providing a good quality of life while we can. It was so sad, the wife was crying and the husband was being so supportive. You could tell that he was trying to keep it together for her. It broke my heart.

There wasn't much time to be sad though because I had to wrastle Marmaduke, an ill-behaved Great Dane. It was like trying to wrestle a foal. Litterally. He was huge. We had to give him medetomidine before we could give him his chemo.

Next week should be busy since we have to fit five days of appointments into four. Stupid labor day. I still have to go in on Monday to take care of Bart, the amazing peeing wonder dog.