i've decided to start kind of a vet school/work diary.....sometimes happy/funny, sometimes sad, but all true.
2/11/02 -- well, it's been awhile since i've written again...a lot has happened. i'm on large aninmal medicine now, so i finally have my own patients again, although i have been sending most of mine home the same day. however, there is Danny Boy...a 7 year old Quarter horse that started out with a corneal ulcer and now has fungal keratitis. what's that? well, it means his cornea is inflamed and infected with a fungus and probably some bacteria too. he basically can't see out of that eye and it tends to spread into the eye, not just on the surface. we're treating it, but it's usually very unrewarding and takes a very long time to show improvement (months). the best thing for him would be a conjunctival graft, which is where we take a piece of the tissue inside his eyelid and cover the ulcer so that vessels can come in and help it to heal. unfortunately, his owner's don't want us to do that, so he may end up losing his eye or even his life if they choose to put him to sleep. this is one of the very frustrating parts of my "job"....you're limited in how much you can do when the owners decide to do something or not do something when all we want to do is what's best for the animal. but money is always an issue, and that makes it very difficult. Danny Boy is very sweet and i can only hope that we're able to help him enough.
12/20/01 -- i'm finally on "vacation" and it was much needed. the last month has seemed like the longest ever...i was on radiology and then necropsy and i took my boards. egads, that was an overall bad day...a 360 question very important, very expensive test and it was pouring the whole day and the vols lost the sec championship. oh well, we move on. so i didn't really have any patients and i ran out of patience. i'm afraid it finally frayed on my nerves enough to make me almost crack...which is why vacation came just in time :) but i should be talking about the animals, so i'll pick one of my lovely lab ladies from orthopedics. she was a bit overweight and had torn both cranial cruciate ligaments (ACL in human terms..the one athletes tend to tear). her name is Roxy..a 3 year old yellow lab. her owner was expecting hip surgery, they really thought it was her hips, but it can look that way when you mess up both knees, so i got her for her first surgery and physical therapy. it's really neat at UT because we have the underwater treadmill. i learned quite a bit about PT because of my lovely lab ladies (the other lab i had was named Lady and she had hip dysplasia that had been fixed years ago and now had a displaced knee cap) anyway, i had to do a lot of icing and passive range of motion exercises with them and then there was the underwater treadmill. most of the dogs love it and it helps them to start touching their feet down after surgery without putting too much weight on it. Roxy really enjoyed it, especially because she would go after the rubber ducky. she would carry it in her mouth asd she treaded away. i took a couple pictures and sent them to her owner since i was no longer on that rotation when i got them developed. she came back to get the other knee done and she had lost more weight which was very important for her. of course, i had to go see her when she came back. that's another hard part about changing rotations every 2 weeks...you lose track of the animal's you treated. i will be sure to post some pictures of Roxy and Lady on here soon.
10/30/01 -- it's been a long time since i've updated. it's hard to keep up, but i should still drop a few stories here and there. actually, the last month i haven't really had patients because of the rotations i was on, but now i'm back in large animal and finishing up my week of overnights where we're here from 8pm to 8am doing treatments and taking in emergencies. it's pretty quiet tonight, which is a blessing compared to what we dealt with earlier in the week. we have Emma, a cloned calf here and i got to feed her a bottle at 2am. she thinks she's a goat because she will try to eat anything she can get her mouth on. and boy is she rough with the bottle! but very cute of course. there are a few horses here, mostly just recovering from surgery and doing fine. i spent a lot of time with Dusty last week. he was an 8 year old Tennessee Walking Horse who had acute renal failure and laminitis, where the hoof wall starts to split away from the rest of the foot...very painful, and poor Dusty had it in all 4 feet. he didn't stand much, which took the weight off his feet, but horses aren't meant to lay down for so long because the weight can cause their lungs to get squashed and make it difficult to breath. they also get sores and Dusty also has ileus, which means his intestines weren't moving as they should. they took him to surgery, but he didn't make it. i spent a lot of time with him, just trying to give him a little peace and comfort. sometimes that's all we can do.
7/13/01 -- Friday the 13th...it started out rough, but smoothed out ok. I'm on large animal surgery now, which is mainly equine. i've been very tired and very busy on this rotation...horses are definitely hard work...even the babies can push me around :) i sent home all of my patients so far...all doing well when they left. yesterday i sent home my foal who had an aberrant parotid duct. what the heck is that? well, it's a salivary gland with a duct that doesn't go into the mouth like it's supposed to. instead, it folds back on itself and just keeps collecting saliva and making his poor face get bigger and bigger. we had to drain it and we injected the gland with formalin (yikes!) to kill the tissue so it would stop producing saliva. his other side works fine, so losing this side won't be a problem, and he's eating just fine. i've had a few patients just stay for the day and go home, and my other long-term patient was Kyriea, who had to have colic surgery...he had a displaced colon and his small intestine was twisted, causing him severe abdominal pain. but he went home and he's doing great. it's amazing that they can have major surgery with their belly cut into and then all that weight is on it the next day and there's no problems. we've gotten to see some wild surgeries these last couple weeks. one horse had guttural puch mycosis...which is basically a fungal plaque in the guttural pouch (which communicates with the ear canal) and the plaque can erode the internal carotid artery (which leads to the brain)...then they bleed from the nose and we had to tie off that artery...very scary. but he went home today and is doing fine. i'm supposed to be working on a paper, so i guess that's all for now :)
6/30/01 -- wow, i don't even know where to begin. these last couple of weeks have been truly awful. i'm on small animal medicine right now and the doctor i'm working with is brutal. she likes to talk and talk and talk about the animals and their problems for hours, meanwhile the animal are getting more and more sick because we haven't actually done anything to help them because we've been talking. it's very frustrating. any suggestions we make are shot down, and 3 days later the doctor makes the same suggestions as if they were her own. but that isn't what this journal is supposed to be about. my only patient right now is Frank, a 16 year old kitty who may have lupus. we've done all kinds of tests on him and his bloodwork was very scary a few days ago...almost no white cells which means his body can't fight infection very well...he also has very low platelets, which are the main "ingredients" in forming clots, so we're afraid he could start bleeding internally at any time. plus we've now put him on steroids which also suppress the immune system. we have to do this because it's his own immune system that seems to be making him sick. poor old boy, we have so many medicines we have to give him and he's not eating very well, but his white cell count is coming up and he's hanging in there. we only have one more real day on the rotation and i will be happy to get out and move on. i've lost one patient so far, which is actually pretty amazing considering how sick all of the animals are that come here. Peggy was a wonderful cat..14 years old and attacked by a neighbor's dog while coming through her kitty door. unfortunately, she also had FIV, a bad kitty virus, and this kept her from being able to heal normally. it was very sad and started my day off on the wrong foot. i've had many other patients over the last 2 weeks...Blake and Beau are both older dogs who are drinking and urinating much more often and both of them are hypothyroid. Cat is a 16 year old kitty who was losing weight and we found out he had pancreatic cancer. he went home to get some TLC because there really isn't anything we can do for him. Mocha is a 16 year old kitty with hyperthyroidism, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (a big heart pumping too hard), and multiple myeloma, which is usually a cancer of the bone marrow. Mocha's tumor was in his spleen though and didn't seem to have spread anywhere else yet. we sent him home and he's now on chemotherapy. those have been the big ones, but there have been many more. it's a very stressful place to be, but it's more about the people making me stressful and not the animals..the animals are wonderful. even when they're sick, they are still so sweet and give that unconditional love...it's amazing.
6/11/01 -- It's been awhile since i've written because i haven't been at work or school...just vacation, so no animal stories to share until now. i've been on clinics for a week now and i'm finally settled in enough to start on my web page again.
my first patient was maggie may, who is a therapy dog for cancer patients. maggie had her thyroid and parathyroid glands previously removed on one side because the were "overactive" and producing too much calcium in her body. usually these glands control the calcium levels, but they just weren't doing it, so they took the affected glands out. she still had high calcium, so we needed to go in and look at the other side and we ended up removing the rest of her thyroid and parathyroid glands. this should have caused her calcium to all but disappear, but it didn't. she went home on thyroid medicine and she's happy and doing great, but something else is causing her to produce too much calcium and we didn't find the problem. usually if it's not the thyroid or parathyroids, it means it's cancer somewhere else in the body. we couldn't find any signs of this however, so we're hoping for the best.
my next patient was rusty...a springer spaniel with lots of lumps and bumps. the one of real concern was on his neck and it was the size of a softball! he had a lump previously removed from the same place, but it was much smaller. this mass invaded the muscle and reached his backbone and his esophagus, so we had to take it out. we also removed a couple other lumps and rusty was flying on morphine for a couple days. he would wake up in pain and i was worried, but a couple days after surgery, he didn't need pain medication anymore and he got to go home...he was happy as could be, running around and being a great dog. now we wait to see what the pathologists will tell us about his lumps...of course, i hope for the best.
next is scooter, who is actually my friend leslie's dog. he had to have an anal gland removed. these can get infected and impacted and sometimes they just have to get taken out to try to resolve the problem. it happens a lot in small dogs (scooter is a poodle and rightly named :) ) he got to go home the next day and she says he's doing ago, but he's a bit sore. i would be too if someone did surgery on my butt! we're hoping he'll start eating again real soon.
and lastly today i had a miniature pinscher that i got to spay myself and we had to remove a pin that had been put in to fix a broken leg last month. she was a doll...her name was trixie and she's only 7 months old. i don't think she ever walks on her own feet because everyone wants to hold her. she went home this evening. tomorrow i start with a dental and i may also have a hernia repair. i'm getting used to all the crazy paperwork and actually talking with the clients and doing my own physical exams. it's very exciting!
oh, i have to mention that when i was on emergency i also had a patient...another poodle named brylie who had apparently hurt his back. but we found that it's probably his leg and stomach area that probably really hurt him. his knee cap snaps out of place (this is common in poodles and other small dogs) and he may have torn his ACL just like human athletes do. he also may have pancreatitis which means his pancreas is "eating" itself because of the table scraps he gets. greasy things like bacon, ham, and hamburgers can make dogs very sick..especially little ones. he went home and may come back for a full work-up and knee surgery. that's all for now....i'm going to try to keep this updated as much as possible!
4/29/01 -- Jodi is a brindle greyhound...sweet as can be. We found out that Jodi had osteosarcoma in her humerus, which is bone cancer. we had to amputate her front leg, but so far there's no sign that it has spread. today i got the pleasure of "hanging out" with her, walking her, etc. she actually wanted to run with me and she just had surgery wednesday! well, i called her owners to let them know how she was doing and the woman was in tears. she ssaid i made her day because she was so worried that Jodi would be in pain, missing her limb, and just generally depressed. i was so happy to talk to an owner who cared so much that they call twice a day to check on Jodi, and that's because they've forced themselves not to call more often. did i mention that i love my job? :)
3/25/01 -- i performed my first 2 horse castrations on friday! it was the perfect weather for it and i was quite impressed with myself. as far as i know, all is well with my 2 latest patients :) i am sorry to say though that my wily friend Snookie had to be put to sleep. an important thing to remember....the good always comes with the bad, but the good will always outweigh the bad.
3/6/01 -- Snookie McCoy....a black dachshund/beagle type mix, as wide as he is long, allergic to the world, and mean as a snake. i love the him nonetheless, poor old boy. he really is allergic to just about everything and it has been an ongoing battle to try to keep him in decent shape. he has awful bouts with skin and ear infections and comes in almost like clockwork every 2 weeks. his owners can't get his medicine in him consistently, so we try to do all we can until the next time he comes around. cleaning his ears and trimming his nails are always adventures. my first encounter with snookie was attempting to give him amoxidrops...pretty pink liquid you just squirt in the mouth right? well no one told me snookie wasn't having any of it, and he gave me a welcoming bite on the thumb when i tried. not much damage...i guess he figured he'd give me a break because i was new :) but as we work on snookie and rub his belly and talk soothing to him, he growls and snarls the whole way. he's taken a turn for the worse lately and had to have an IV put into his short, crooked leg. he proceeded to remove it almost immediately after. after another wrestling match, he was hooked up again, with a nice wad of vet wrap to try to get through before he could remove it again. needless to say we left him pouting in the cage, waiting to see what he would leave for us the following morning.
3/5/01 -- i'll start here by talking about JJ...he's a 13 month old german shepherd who has been in and out of our clinic almost all his life. we've been on a constant search trying to fins out what is wrong with him, he's wasting away to almost nothing, even though he has a tremendous appetite. unfortunately, i have found out that german shepherds are one of the breeds that tend to get odd diseases, many through genetics and improper breeding. JJ is a great dog though. he's so happy, with his big floppy ears and his gangly walk. recently he's been brought here to the vet school where i go to visit him almost every day. they're trying something with him...he may have something called EPI (Exocrine Pancreatic Insufficiency) where he can't produce the enzymes necessary to breakdown his food so he can absorb the proper nutrients. we're all keeping our fingers crossed. i want JJ to be a success story.
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