A Day At My External Clinic.

Every Wednesday, I help out at a nearby vet clinic, to complete my work experience requirement of 120 hours by the end of November. So far, I've completed 22 hours over the last two months, which is a good start to the year without doing too much too early. I've been a little rusty the past few weeks, but I'm getting back into the swing of things. I'm finding that a lot of the things I had trouble with last year aren't so much of a problem, but I'm doing a lot more things that I haven't learned in detail yet, which will be helpful for class because I'll have some background to go off, but it's not so helpful now, when I feel like I SHOULD know things, but have a lot of trouble with them.

At my external clinic, there are two major vet nurses, who we'll call Hannah and Maria (Not their actual names), a clinic cat named Ivy, and several alternating vets. The major one I work with is a man called Bernard. He's a bird specialist, so I'm getting quite a lot more experience handling birds than most other people in my class, I suspect.  They're all very helpful, and happy to show me things, which really helps.

Today, we had a corgi in for lump removal and a dental, and a rabbit in to be neutered. The rabbit was the first rabbit I've handled during treatment, and he was rather jumpy. It was quite difficult to place the catheter for his anaesthetic because he'd twitch his head even a little, and the needle would slip out. It was quite interesting watching the other vet nurses place it eventually, though, since rabbits are one of the only animals that have large enough veins in their ears to make it a viable catheter site. He was recovering very well when I left, and had already munched through a good deal of the lettuce from the vet's salad during recovery. Since rabbits have such a high metabolism, and have evolved as constant grazers, it's very important that they aren't off their food (for whatever reason) for too long - they're not fasted for more than a few hours before surgery, and they're offered food as soon as they're awake afterwards.

The corgi was very well-behaved, so we were able to get her catheter in promptly, despite a bit of difficulty holding her stubby legs. The usual hold for a catheter involves the holder extending the elbow and holding off the cephalic vein, but that was quite hard with her (as opposed to a longer-legged dog), as her elbows were tucked close to her sides, and corgi forearms aren't very long either.  However, she didn't protest much at all, so it was merely a mechanical difficulty. Her lump removal went fairly well, though the doppler probe and blood pressure cuff were also playing up - again, part of being a corgi.

Some of my new textbooks for next year arrived in the post today, which will help a lot with the problems I'm having with remembering the different testing methods. Added to my books from last year, I'm getting quite a good little reference library going, which I hope I'll be able to continue to use for some time, depending on how fast they go out of date. At any rate, they'll make it a lot easier to do assignments, and I have the chance to get in a little bit of advance reading on tough spots in the next week or so, before classes begin.