Greetings from Lexington Kentucky!! I have just finished my first week at Rood and Riddle and I absolutely love it here. The weather has been wonderful and my accommodations are fantastic. Jackie and I are staying with three other interns at the recipient mare farm, and my bedroom window overlooks one of the pastures so I am watching the mares graze as I type.
The mares outside my window
My first week has been incredibly busy. I spent my first day in surgery learning how to take a horse through the surgery process, from anesthesia to getting them on the table to scrubbing and helping them to recover safely. The surgeries that I watched were mostly arthroscopies and sesmoid fractures. The thing I loved most about being in surgery was seeing how well everyone works together as a team to make the surgeries efficient and successful. It was a wonderful atmosphere to be around.
Starting on Tuesday morning, I began riding with Dr. Woodrow Friend. He is one of the ambulatory veterinarians here at RREH and I have been learning so much from him. He mainly does reproduction work so we spend a lot of time at breeding farms palpating and ultrasounding mares. We also flush the mares which I had never heard of before this. We guide a tube into the mare's vagina and through the cervix and fill her uterus with a saline solution, sometimes mixed with betadine and DMSO and the suck it back out to clean out her uterus. I have gotten pretty good at this so that I can now do it by myself. I have also had the chance to artificially inseminate a mare. Dr. Friend also does a lot of calyx surgeries where he sews the top half of the vulva shut to prevent manure from entering the vagina. This is a common practice in Thoroughbreds because of their conformation. As far as breeding work, I have also watched a stallion being collected, rectally palpated a mare, and saw a mare who had third degree tearing of her vagina during a difficult birth that resulted in a loss of separation between her rectum and her vagina.
Mare with torn vagina
Outside of reproduction work, Dr. Friend also has regular clients so our days have been mixed with emergencies and lamenesses and everything else as well. We have seen a couple of colics as well as a very sick foal who had a temperature of 106.3F. We also looked at another horse who had such a badly deformed hoof, the coffin bone was pushing out the bottom of the hoof and the hoof wall and the skin above it were separating. We have done some routine lameness exams with nerve blocks as well as joint injections and we have casted some foals who were born with contracted tendons to help straighten out their legs. We have also done some teeth and endoscopy work.
A foal I did a leg cast on
I love being on ambulatory as the day is always an adventure with emergencies and routine stops mixed together. I love seeing all the different barns and the barn managers and horse owners have been so nice and knowledgeable. There are also plenty of owners who do not mind letting me work on their horses so Dr. Friend has been wonderful at teaching me how to do pretty much anything I want to learn. I have learned so much in the first 5 days that I cannot wait for next week!
Thanks for reading! Check back next week for more updates!
Sarah
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