MSU Large Animal Clinic week 1-3

Hello Everyone! My name is Elizabeth Wuopio and I am doing my fellowship in the Large Animal Clinic here at MSU! I have been working second shift (from 4pm to 2am) so the only new patients coming in during this time are emergencies. The three weeks have been decently busy! On average, we have been getting about one to two emergencies in a night, some nights three. These emergencies have been mostly horses with colic. My duties when the emergencies come in is to help the veterinary technicians and doctors with whatever is needed. This includes getting the patient registered, holding horses in the stocks, running blood work, setting up stalls, and hanging fluids. When a colic comes in, doctors and clinical students complete a full work up which includes a physical exam, blood work, putting in a I.V. catheter, ultrasounding the GI tract, rectal exam, putting in a nasogastric tube, and performing an abdominocentesis. The initial work up helps figure out why the horse is colicing and helps the doctors figure out what steps to take next.

Another common emergency around this time of year is sick foals. Some of the foals that come in don’t get adequate amount of colostrum in their first day of life. Colostrum is the mare’s milk that contains immunoglobulins, so the foal can fight off pathogens that it encounters in its environment. When the foal doesn’t receive enough of the colostrum then they can become sick very quickly. This is called failure of passive transfer, or FPT. These foals normally will get an I.V. catheter, a feeding tube, and sometimes are put on oxygen. As a working student, I get to help milk the mares and feed the foals through the tube. I also help with other treatments and giving medications.

When there isn’t emergencies coming in, I help the veterinary technicians complete hourly rounds on the patients that are in the hospital. These duties include picking out stalls, filling water buckets, feeding, giving medications, milking mares, feeding foals, refluxing colic horses, walking/grazing horses, hanging fluids, physical exams, etc.

So far it has been a lot of fun working in MSU’s Large Animal Clinic. I have one more week of night shifts then I’m switching to the day shift for the month of June!