Hi there; Birdie here!
I've finished my first full 4-week block, my equine rotation. Even though it's a whole block, it's kind of split into two half blocks. There's two surgery services and a medicine service, and the students on the rotation switch services after the first two weeks. My rotation had 11 students, and there's only one medicine service, so some of us didn't get to do medicine. I think one of the surgery services pretty much kept the same students the whole block. I did a surgery service first and medicine second.
The surgery service was really busy when I was on it. We had a few chronic cases that stayed from the first few days on block until we switched services (some even all through the block). We learned a lot about bandage changes and the GameReady, which ices and compresses a leg to bring down swelling. I got to scrub in on a laparoscopic orchiectomy on a cryptorchid stallion who turned out to be monorchid, which was really interesting. One night we stayed until 11:30 at night to recover a horse from a second colic surgery and then lavage his abdomen. We also had a bunch of lameness exams, which I really enjoyed and felt like I learned a lot from. I'm not very confident about watching for lameness, so it was run when I got it right. For one of my cases, I got to do a nerve block and then successfully saw the lameness switch to the other leg when the block worked.
On surgery service, everyone can go in to watch the surgery (any students can go in and watch, really, as long as they wear caps and masks) and the student on the case scrubs in to the surgery and then writes the surgery report afterward. They were more lenient about paperwork in equine than small animal. We still had to write SOAPs every day, discharge summaries, and surgery reports, but it wasn't nearly as stringent as our junior surgery lab reports. Also they didn't look at our paperwork immediately. Like, I know I missed a lot and probably got some things wrong in the report for my cryptorchid, but I never heard anything about it.
For emergencies throughout the block, each of us on the block took 4 shifts as primary on call and 4 shifts as secondary. Some people got called in every time they were on call. I got called in only a couple of times. Once, we had two colics come in at once, and I was helping to do the workups on both of them until the secondary student got there. Another time, there were almost 3 emergencies, but none of them actually ended up coming in.
The medicine service was really slow this block, but I still got a couple of cases when I was on for the second half of the block. It seems like most of what we did was foals with diarrhea, and colics. A lot of colics from emergencies got transferred to medicine (my emergency colic ended up transferring to medicine the same day I did, so I just kept that case). Both of my colics had gastric ulcers, which we diagnosed on gastroscopy. We did a bunch of gastroscopies and a couple guttural pouches, but didn't diagnose any laryngeal paralysis, unlike my previous equine hospital experience. Medicine was much bigger on rounding than surgery. This was partially because it was so slow, so we had topic rounds on endocrine diseases or fluid calculations. But it was also just because they wanted to talk about and plan what we were doing a lot more and keep everyone on the same page. If they actually kept us informed, that would have been great. Unfortunately most days we just sat around with no clear idea what was going on--and then at 4:30 they wanted us to round instead of going home.
I got to practice a bunch of skills on this rotation, too. I put in jugular catheters several times. For one of my foal cases, I helped put in a long over the wire catheter. I had some trouble with that one--it's hard to keep the long pieces sterile, especially when you don't really know what you're doing. I did an ultrasound on that foal, too. We looked for broken ribs (ultrasound is a better diagnostic than x-rays in foals--it's more sensitive, and you can see which side it's on and also the effect on surrounding soft tissues) and scanned the umbilical cord. I'm still proud of how good the images I got were--one of the house officers said my pictures were "textbook"! One particularly slow day, we got out some of the teaching horses to practice procedures. I did an over the wire catheter myself since I'd messed up the first time and wanted to do better. I still broke sterility, but apparently I did an impressive job of suturing it in with a little smooth backhand action.
One of the toughest things about this rotation was that we didn't really have any days off unless we happened to not have any cases over the weekend (which may have happened once). We were responsible not only for the 7am treatments but also 7pm treatments. We still got to leave before 7 most days (we could usually start evening treatments around 5), but on weekends that meant we had to come back in. Combine that with 7am treatments which (1) mean we never have a chance to sleep in and catch up on sleep and (2) sometimes went until 11:30 am to finish all the rechecks, bandage changes, etc., and it means no days off. It was tough, but not nearly as bad as I was expecting. I guess staying at school for about 12 hours doesn't feel as bad as it sounds. Especially when you're actually doing stuff and learning.
The clinicians were great teachers on this rotation, and I learned a lot. Some of the house officers were a lot better about teaching us than others were. Overall, it was a tough rotation, and I was glad for it to be over. But it wasn't as bad as I expected. I learned a lot, and some things were even pretty fun!
Despite how much time it took up, I still managed to make a riding lesson every week. In fact, the first weekend I even got to ride in a schooling show! I was on Baby, and I got to do the medal class for the first time. I love the medal class, it was so much fun! The medal class is a more complicated course with lots of rollbacks. Those tough, tight turns are my favorite. I did my course early in the order, but I didn't untack when I was done because I wanted to ride into the ring for the ribbons. And it's a good thing I didn't, because they called 6 of us (including me) back into the ring to "test the riders" with a short portion of the course ending in a halt. My horse didn't want to get going again--she thought she was done! I thought I might get marked down for how much I had to fight her to get her going again. But I put it out of my mind (they're testing the riders, not the horses, I told myself) and did a great job over the jumps. And then I ended up winning the medal class! I was totally not expecting it, but it was a great bonus to how much fun it was.
Now I'm starting (small animal) surgery rotation, so that'll be my next post. It's not a break at all--there's no way I can make riding lessons this block. But if I get through it, it's summer! In clinics, we don't really get summer off; it just worked out that between family vacation, the Live Oak Bank summer program, and when an externship happened to fall I'm about to spend 3 months away from school. At least, if I get through surgery first!
