Taking it down a notch

Need to calm myself!

It's a lot of information to learn (again) but I know I can do it! I need to know this stuff forever anyways for my career so why not start now right?

Ok, back to work.

Procrastinating when I shouldn't be

So it's been 7 months since I blogged last, I apologize. As you may already know, I am horrible with keeping people updated about my life as I always think nothing is happening!

So 3rd year finished and I will be resitting some things in August so that is what I'm studying for at the moment. Not exactly happy about it by any means but I'm trying to pull the confidence I need to not get stuck in this rut for another year. I REALLY do NOT want to!!!! I was really close the last times so I'm hoping if I just do better by a little teeny tiny bit then I'll be just fine.

Went back to Toronto for a month and a bit in June which was great. Got to see family and friends and even some dragonboating! I totally missed coaching so I have to thank my friend Alex Ting for letting me drum/coach his J&J team at TIDBRF, it was so much fun and we won a silver in our division!

I also volunteered at a first opinion practice for 3 weeks which was great. Got to meet a lot of different people, and even this one guy tried setting me up with his son! Ok, that wasn't a "great" moment but it'll be a funny story to tell...right? Are you laughing? Ok, maybe not that funny.

I really enjoyed my placement there and I am definitely going to go back! Milliken-Bridlewood is a great clinic and all the vets there are great to learn from!

After that, I went and did referral work for 2 weeks at the Toronto Veterinary Emergency/Referral Hospital. The cases were more interesting but it definitely wasn't as personal and it's definitely a stark contrast to first opinion practice. I got to do a lot of ortho surgeries with some of the surgical vets there. A lot of stifle things, and two splenectomies (removal of the spleen). I even got to scrub in and assist with them which was a great experience. I realized suction is such a vital tool when it comes to long surgeries such as orthopedic ones as well as electrocautery is so important. I think without electrocautery, trying to maintain hemostasis would have been a lot more difficult. There is only so much swabs can do! I think it's even cooler that you can cauterize indirectly too - as in, holding the vessel with a pair of forceps and then have the cautery blade touch the forceps instead. Of course though, there are downsides to it. Firstly, if you use it too quickly or not really look at where you are cauterizing then you can accidentally cut a vessel that is too large to cauterize *blood squirt* and then you'll need suture material to ligate it together. Secondly, the smell. Man, the smell of burning flesh is definitely not nice. You think, "oh, smells like BBQ!", and yes, I did think of that at the beginning, but then the smell reminded me of burning carcasses, like when I was in India and they were burning all the dead animals. Not a good smell at all!

One of the more memorable surgeries was a dog that came in with a splenic mass. The staff there nicknamed the dog "Brick" because it's abdomen was so rock solid (but no squishing of it of course!). When we opened up the dog, there was this GIGANTIC mass just sitting on top of everything! It had displaced all of the intestines caudally (towards the back) and we weren't able to do a full assessment of it's abdomen before excising the mass. It had to have weighed a good 5 lbs, it was heavy. I remember because at one point, the doc asked me to hold it in a certain position while she ligated the vessels, and that thing was HEAVY. Not only was it big and round, it was in this tough capsule that kindof allowed us to see all of these different colours on the surface of the mass. I saw purples, reds, blues, yellows, all from different substances (blood, siderophores, etc.), it almost looked like a galaxy...but on a splenic mass! And once we took out the mass, she opened the capsule to get a couple of histology samples, and the whole thing just bled out. When you think about it, the spleen is like a giant blood sponge, it holds a lot of it and when you cut it, it bleeds like crazy.

Another memorable one had to be this femoral fracture on my last day. It was only fractured in one place (spiral fracture) but as I was holding it, a crack on the side of the bone cracked even more and became this splinter on the bone, so now we had two fractures to deal with! I was like "omg, did I do that?!" but the doc reassured me it wasn't my fault so I started breathing after that. Whew! We believed that that particular dog has some sort of bone pathology because it fractured it's leg so easily just running for a toy and by just manipulating the pieces of bone back into a reduced and appropriate configuration, it cracked again! We took some pieces for a histology test as well.

I won't know what will become of these dogs now that I am back in Edinburgh but I wish them the best and good luck to the vets and owners as well. It's tough to think that you bring a dog in for a fracture surgery that costs like $4500 and then realize it might have bone cancer. That's just tough to think about.

Now though, back to focusing on getting into fourth year! It's tough but hopefully I'm more fruitful the second time around.

Stop procrastinating and get back to work!