Both me and Katrine arrived early today. Their was a ER patient who had been hit by a car. He was quite friendly though and was not seriously hurt thankfully. He was quite the curios dog. There was a steady flow of patients in the morning that seemed around lunchtime, and increased again around 2:00 in the afternoon. In the morning, around 10:50, we went in to observe a surgery. It was a knee surgery on one of the hind legs. Of the two treatments i described yesterday this one is more commonly used on larger dogs. We had to use this on the little dog though because of the angle of her knee joint. The technique rotates part of the tibia back into the proper angle while securing it their with a metal brace screwed into the bone. This allows for the ball and socket joint to work properly. I learned how getting prepared for surgery can be up to a five person job. First you have to sterilize the part of the patient you are operating on, next the surgeon, or surgeons, must scrub down. Than they must put on the overcoat for the surgery as well as the gloves. They may also to touch anything with their bare hands during this process. Everyone in the room has to wear a hair net and face mask. Depending on the surgery you may require more protective wear. Another thing I learned is that you never lean over the patient’s open wound because skin cells, and other particles on your skin are prone to fall off and my fall into the incision. In the afternoon I watched as they prepped another dog for surgery. This time it was for the gastro-intestinile track. Dogs can show up in the ER for anything from as small as a broken snout, to needing to be kept alive and stabilizing them. We saw both of those kinds of patients today. We also saw a puppy who had gotten into something the night before and had to come to the ER. There were also dogs for checkups there. We watched vets wrap both a medium sized dog’s leg in a cast as well as a tiny dog’s leg in a cast. We met a dog who was very friendly. His problem was he had to few platelets in his blood. Platelets help stop bleeding, and so if you have to few of them you can have some very serious internal bleeding. Over all it was a interesting day. Most of it was taken up by surgery. But we got to see a lot of interesting and varied cases.
