Surgery Rotation- November 2007

Picture: My first spay!
I just finished my 2 week long Shelter Medicine and Surgery Rotation. This rotation was by far the hardest rotation that I will have this year. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays begin at 8am when all of the shelter animals get checked into the hospital. I pick an animal, do a complete physical exam and run bloodwork and any other tests that need to be done. I then analyze the clinical pathology of the bloodwork results and decide if that animal is healthy enough to spay/neuter or if it's not I develop a plan to diagnose and treat the patient. I then either go into surgery or pick another patient and start all over again. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I work on cadavers performing more difficult surgeries such as a cranial cruciate ligament surgery, total ear canal ablation surgery, transpalpebral eneucleation etc.I spent my birthday practicing orthopedic surgery (repairing a cranial cruciate ligament, patella luxation, and using a normograde technique to place an intramedullary pin in a tibia).
Most of my patients were too sick to spay/neuter. However, I did get to spay one cat and neuter two kittens. I learned more about internal medicine these past two weeks then I have in the past two years combined.