I have been working at Littleton Equine Medical Clinic for a little over two weeks now. The practice amazing. There are thirteen permanent doctors, four interns, and more technicians and supporting staff than I can remember the names of. They do surgery, reproduction, radiology, ambulatory, and even MRI and bone scan. Starting in June, I will get to rotate through each department and get a chance to work with each of the doctors.
This month, however, I am working in the ICU where we monitor colics, post-op surgery horses, and anything else that needs to have a close eye on it. The ICU technicians are great about teaching and explaining things. They have a policy that you must know something about a drug before you are allowed to give it; and since we do treatments every three hours, there is a lot to know. Needless to say, I have had to brush up on my pharmacology. The best part of working in ICU, though, is getting to work on clinical skills like listening to gut sounds and drawing blood -- things that you only get better at with practice.
Most of the horses that have come in to ICU since I've been here were colics, but today we had a mare come in for a choke that was not responding to typical therapy. They passed a scope down into her esophagus, and it showed an impacted mat of shavings and grass. They attempted to pull out enough pieces with the scope that the rest could be flushed out. Unfortunately, this was ultimately unsuccessful. The horse was not a surgical candidate, so she had to be euthanized. The intern in charge of the case did a necropsy and found this:
We didn't find any constrictions, just this very hard pack of wood chips and grass that would never have come undone no matter how much they picked at it with the tools on the scope.
Fortunately, most of the cases I have seen had better outcomes than this one, and I am thoroughly enjoying my experience here. You never know what will come in, so every day is different.
Until next time
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