A week on exotics rotation

Today was my 11th day out at the Hospital for Small Animals (HFSA) between last week's ICU and this week's exotics rotation. I have really enjoyed the exotics rotation this week and have gotten a lot of rabbit and lizard handling/treatment experience. This is the most I have ever handled rabbits and I quite like them. They're quite easy to work with and easy to treat. This whole week has been consultations and surgery with exotic animals. Monday and Tuesday I was on for surgery and was responsible for monitoring anesthesia. Monday was easy as we had a dental on a rabbit with overgrown cheek teeth/incisors. The rest of the day was treatment of the hospitalized rabbits and recovering the rabbit that had the dental procedure. Tuesday, we had a Netherland Dwarf rabbit that was in for overgrown cheek teeth/incisors. During the surgery, the nurse was holding the head up for the surgeon working on burring the teeth. As they were working on the mouth, I noticed the heart rate dropped from 220bpm to about 75bpm. The breathing pattern became very shallow and labored and was about 5 breaths per minute. Seconds later, the heart rate had completely disappeared and I brought it to the attention of the surgeon immediately. The rabbit was slowly becoming cyanotic and the surgeon immediately began CPR. After about a minute, the rabbit's heart rate returned to about 68bpm and slowly increased over a period of about 15 min. We recovered the rabbit and placed it in the incubator for a while. Towards the end of the day, the rabbit had fully recovered from the event and was looking great. Vitals were within normal parameters and he was much more alert. Yesterday, we had our dissection practical of entire female rabbits so that we could practice our spaying skills for Monday's live rabbit spay we are required to perform. The rabbits we were given were immature so their uteruses were virtually non-existent! Everything inside the abdomen was so friable and I had to be so gentle with tissue handling! It was a good practical to refresh knowledge of rabbit anatomy and practice suture tying. They use a particular type of knot here in Scotland called the Aberdeen Knot. It is used at the end of the simple continuous intradermal suture pattern. It's a nice knot technique and is extremely fast to do. Today, we had consultations and surgery. It was my turn to take on consultations with one of the clinicians. I went in on a red-footed tortoise consultation, an African Grey Parrot consultation and a Horsefield Tortoise consultation. The African Grey Parrot we saw was extremely friendly and was good to practice restraining with a towel. The owner of the parrot was a 4th year vet student and the bird had the neatest trick. The owner would have the parrot perched on her hand and aim at the bird with her other hand that was in the shape of a gun. She yelled "bang!" and the bird fell backwards and swung upside down as if it had been shot! Was hilarious and awesome! What a neat bird! After the consultations were over, we treated some more rabbits. The clinician in the exotics ward then had to perform a post mortem on an axolotle. This axolotle had been dead for about 7 days and was in cold storage the entire time. When we got it out and placed it on the table for dissection, the tail started curling and uncurling. Every time you touched the tail with an instrument it would curl and uncurl. I got the doppler probe out to ensure it was dead and there was no heartbeat that I could find. I told the clinician that was on duty that she would need to come out and pith the axolotle just to be sure. So she came out and pithed the axolotle and administered euthasol as well. The tail was still moving afterwards! We went ahead with the post mortem examination with the tail moving the entire time. Was a very creepy dissection!

A week of ICU...

After finishing a week of ICU, I am utterly exhausted! Starting last Monday and ending yesterday, I had to complete 7 days of ICU. For the first few days, we had constant monitors where someone had to be down in the ICU ward constantly to monitor the patients. After Wednesday, ICU was quiet and we had to treat patients in the surgery wards and walk all of the dogs. On Friday, a greyhound with an open distal tibial fracture came in as an emergency at around 1am. I chose to take the case as you all know me and orthopaedics! I was quite excited about the case. When they came in, the referring vet had put on a splint that was not very good at all. The blood from the open fracture site had been tracking down the splint and the dog was leaving a trail of blood all over the floor and my pants. We took the dog to the treatment room and placed an IV catheter and administered morphine ASAP. We moved the dog to anaesthesia where we anaesthetized the dog with propofol. Once intubated and stabilized we moved to radiology and took several radiographs. The fracture was a comminuted fracture of the distal diaphysis of the tibia. Supposedly there was involvement with the articular surface as fissures had formed distally from the fracture site. We put a splint on temporarily until the next morning when the surgery would take place. Well, we came down the next afternoon and they had amputated the dog's leg! Apparently it was going to cost the owner about £6,000 and they simply couldn't afford it. So the dog was on ICU all weekend and the weekends require 24 hours a day monitoring/treatment. So the four of us split the days into two 8-hour shifts with two of us on each shift so that we could get some sort of sleep. I tell you what, the entire week was such a shock to my body for sleep and diet that I felt horrible! Every other day my sleep cycle would alternate from sleeping in the morning to sleeping at night. I am so glad ICU is over...for now until my actual ICU rotation begins, which is 3 weeks long! The week I just did was just for completing my EMS weeks. It was a week of basically seeing how little sleep you could get whilst still trying to maintain a functional mental state and staying alert in case there were emergencies.