OzVet

So I’ve finished my first week of veterinary school classes! It’s been a really busy week, but pretty exciting too. I’m taking 4 classes this semester (Gross Anatomy, Microanatomy, Embryology and Physiology) and have either class or lab from 8am until about 4 or 5pm Monday through Thursday. And with studying on top of that, I’ve spent a fairly good portion of my waking hours on the third floor of Trotter Hall during the past week. However, my classes are wonderful so far, our professors and lab instructors are (mostly) interesting to listen to and (perhaps more importantly) seem genuinely committed to helping us succeed, and the rest of my classmates are just awesome.

We have one lecture hall where we have all of our lectures and across the hall we have a large cross-shaped room where we have all of our labs. The lab room is set up brilliantly–there’s one lab bench for every lab group of four people, and then behind on each side are two desks. So, we each get a desk complete with a shelf for storing books/binders/etc. and cabinets and drawers that can be locked. Since we all have desks in the lab room (and all the lab specimens live in the lab room), the lab becomes the optimal place for studying. This is brilliant because it encourages teamwork and group study and even if you want to study alone, it means there’s usually others around and available should a question arise (or if you just need a break from studying and someone to chat with!)

First year students have no class of Friday. This is so that all of our tests can be scheduled for Friday morning and so that we can spend Friday afternoons shadowing 4th year students in the teaching hospital. (The school is great about making sure we get connected to faculty and upperclassmen–I’ve been assigned a 4th year student and a faculty mentor and a sophomore buddy.) We didn’t have a test yesterday since it was the first week of classes, so I spent most of the day in the clinics following around several 4th year students on both the equine side of the clinic and the food animal side. In equine I got to watch 4th years practicing neurological exams on horses, see part of a lameness exam, watch sperm collection from a stallion and also got to look at some abnormal sperm under a microscope. On the food animal side of the clinic I watched the examination and treatment of an alpaca with a uterine torsion and a really sick goat.

The alpaca with the uterine torsion was really interesting to see. The vet can diagnose a uterine torsion (which basically means one horn of the uterus twists up on top of the other horn) using a rectal palpation and can also determine the extent and direction of the twist. The torsion can be corrected either surgically or non-surgically and most always it’s good to try and do it non-surgically first. Non-surgically involves laying the animal on her side and then having several people rotate her slowly to her other side while someone else  massages and manipulates her belly, trying to work the fetus back into the proper position. Then, if this doesn’t work, the same technique is tried again, with the addition of one arm of a vet inserted rectally for addition manipulation and support. This seemed to get her straightened out, although the vets decided to keep monitoring her for the next couple of days to make sure the uterus didn’t twist back on itself again.