missing post...

Sorry, this one was supposed to go after the last wildlife post but before the emergency post.....

9.12.08

I’m sad to leave the wildlife clinic I’ve had a BLAST the entire time and loved every minute of the long hours. Besides learning a lot and enjoying myself, I’m glad I came out here because it solidified my desire to go into wildlife medicine. I definitely want to be a wildlife rehabilitation veterinarian. Now the only standing in my path is the shortage of jobs (less than a dozen full-time wildlife vets in the country…..it’s going to be a waiting game). But I’m going to apply to a couple wildlife medicine internships and a couple exotics/small animal practices and maybe some emergency practices for back-up. I’m crossing my fingers I get one I want!!!

The last two weeks I was back at the vet school on the small animal internal medicine rotation. I had some great cases and some sad cases. Since it’s a vet school (ie well-known referral center) we see extremes; I learned enough but the pace was a bit slow—or rather less efficient than I was used to. But it was a good rotation. I saw some sad cancer cases, some good immune-mediated disease cases that we were able to treat and some cases we never figured out. Good learning lessons.

So now I’m at a small animal emergency center. It is great! Everyone here is incredibly helpful and nice. Last shift, I got to place some intravenous catheters, watch a splenectomy surgery (taking the spleen out of a dog who had hemangiosarcoma), and suture up a wound by myself. Good times

Well I’ve got a long weekend of work ahead of me so I better get some sleep

emergency medicine!

So right now i'm at an emergency/referral vet practice near milwaukee. This place is awesome!! the staff is helpful, the vets are great teachers, and i'm not only learning a ton but getting to do a lot of hands on stuff.

The techs have been great in letting me draw blood and place catheters, and teaching me how to improve my techniques. I've gotten to watch several surgeries including a splenectomy, liver lobectomy, and foreign body removal. I've sutured up a laceration by myself and fixed up two anal gland abscesses. I've also learned about disc disease, severe rodenticide toxicity, other toxicities, seen a lot of CPR, and a ton of other stuff. The hours are great at this place and allow me to be there during the busiest times of the day.

In a week i go to another practice where the hours are not very good and i hear it's just a step down from this place--but as long as i learn, i'll have a blast:)

yay for emergency medicine!

to counteract my rant---something that makes me happy:)

I'm sitting here in panera studying when a 45-50year old man starts talking to a 60 year old man about how feedlot beef cattle and other industrial meat animals have the shaft. Feedlot lot beef cattle are fed a diet of pretty much pure corn and antibiotics. Feeding cattle pure corn produces stomach ulcers in cattle. These stomach ulcers are extremely painful and allow bacteria into the animals' bloodstream which can cause a miriad of problems and ultimately death. The antibiotics, labeled "growth promotants" are needed to counteract the ulcers to allow the cattle to live long enough to slaughter. If the cattle were allowed to live longer, the antibiotics wouldn't be able to last that long and the cattle would die of rumenal ulcers. The reason cattle are fed a diet of pure corn is to get them to grow faster so they can go to slaughter faster....less time spent raising the cattle means more money for the feedlot owner.

anyway--i'm sitting listening to this conversation in the conservative city of milwaukee and it makes me happy to hear that people are thinking:)

if this is news to you, here is a good, reliable link to read about it:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/industrial/

the last bit of tufts wildlife center:(

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Here is me in the ocean in Massachusetts:) yay!

So updates on some of the animals in my last blog: the painted turtle with the hook through it’s head and the broadwing hawk with the broken wing were released! Woo hoo!!

I just realized I didn’t talk about the broad-wing hawk. Well, here he is.

He came in as a juvenile with a broken humerus. We placed an intramedullary pin and external fixature which was taken off two weeks later. We needed him to heal fast and perfectly because he needs to migrate to south America (right about now!). He healed great , was reconditioned and released! Yay!!

Here are some more animals…

This snapping turtle (40+lb male!) came in with lower jaw fractures and a shell fracture. A couple days before I left I got to help wire his jaw back together and clean/wire the shell fracture. He was doing well when I left.

This great-black backed gull had swallowed a fishing hook—it was a really really big one! I assisted the wildlife medicine intern during surgery. We had to go into the bird’s stomach to get the hook out. It’s a lot harder than in a cat or dog. Birds don’t have an abdomen and thorax (chest cavity) like mammals do. They have one cavity called their coelom. This is because they don’t have a diaphragm—they

have thin airsacs that pump air in and out of their lungs. These air sacs are thinner than cellophane wrap

and all over their coelom. So when we were cutting into the coelom, we had to cut through some of the air sacs---you could smell the gas anesthetic in the room—it’s a crazy surgery—very cool! He made

it through surgery and was doing great when I left!

Not sure how well this picture will come out but it’s a newly hatched snapping turtle!! He’s so cute!

This bird is an osprey. Osprey eat fish. And that’s it. They are also….umm…let’s say not the brightest. Sorry, that’s mean. They aren’t dumb—they are very set in their ways of eating fish in the wild. So in captivity—many simply don’t eat. When you get an osprey that doesn’t eat, you have to tube feed it which is stressful on all involved. I took on the osprey after it had been at the center for a week. He wouldn’t eat and was being tube fed. Then I took the case and he decided to start eating;) I think he just got sick of me grabbing him three times a day to feed—hee hee. They are really beautiful birds though.

And I have to end on the cutest picture ever…check out this squirrel with a splint on his broken leg!!! Awww!

a rant...i'm sorry

I need to rant about this....i promise to catch up on my posts (including another one about the wildlife center) after this one--but I just need to post this.

I was working at an emergency center last night when some random person (i think who works there? i don't know who she is) made me want to explode.

A dog was anesthetized and getting prepped for bilateral (both knees) TPLO surgeries. TPLO is used to treat ligament tears in dogs' knees. It stands for tibial plateau leveling osteotomy---what they do is they cut off a chunk of the top of the tibia so the femur sits more nicely on it--so the torn ligament isn't needed---the knee will stay "together" because the tibia has been flattened.

So the dog is getting his lower back shaved for an epidural to control pain---because cutting off two chunks of bone is VERY painful!

The anesthetist is explaining that you don't need to clip this area super short--just get most of hte hair off--because teh hair on a dog's back can grow back slow--so they try to leave some there.

Then this random person starts getting into a heated discussion about how if it was her dog and the hair would grow back slow she wouldn't have the epidural done.

"you would refuse an epidural for your dog even if she was getting bilateral TLPOs?" asked a tech

"yeah--i can't bear to see that shaved spot on my dog for months" the random woman said.

"but what about pain? TPLOs are very very painful" said the tech again.

The random woman went on stubbornly about how she didn't care and would not let an epidural be done.

I'm new at this clinic so i forced myself to stay out of the conversation---it was one of the hardest things i've ever done.

WHAT THE H(#*?!?! You are refusing pain management for your dog who is having an extremely painful surgery done because you wouldn't like his haircut? I can't think of a more selfish and ridiculous thing. I consider that inhumane, neglegent and if i was a judge i would slap her with a fine for animal cruelty. If i was the surgeon i would refuse to cut her dog. period. i just can't understand this kind of thinking---

all you have to do is put yourself in the dog's shoes---would you want to have bones cut off (and bone pain, i'm told, is horrible) with only 50% of the pain management?

i could go on and on but i better stop and do something productive---i need to get rid of this anger.

Wildlife Clinic!

August 16, 2008

Wow---I can’t believe I’m almost done here at the wildlife clinic! The first week I didn’t feel so busy but after that I just haven’t had any time to write anything down. But it’s simply amazing and I’m having a great time out hereJ Here are a few of the cases I’ve had (just a few…there are too many…)

This adult female painted turtle came in with a hook going up into it’s upper jaw and through its eye socket. We thought the hook was going through the eyeball so we prepared to take out the eye—but when we got to the hook out, the eyeball seemed intact! We left the eye in and are treating it with antibiotics. The swelling has gone down and next week we’ll sedate her to get a better look at the eye to see if she can still see out of it.

This loon came in having been grounded (loons should pretty much always be on the water) and thin. Her leg band had slid over her foot, causing a wound, but no other trauma or reason for her to be so thin. After a week and a half, she hadn’t gained much weight and she was still anemic. Loons are especially susceptible to a fungus called aspergillosis and once they have it, they can’t get rid of it. Since we couldn’t find any other reason for her to be so thin, we went looking for aspergillosis. Asper likes to live in the lungs and air sac walls. We scoped the loon (put a camera into her body cavity) and found fungal plaques on her air sacs. Since she’ll never get rid of it, if released she would probably die of starvation and eventually respiratory distress. Sadly, she had to be euthanized.

This salamander is from a local zoo. It has a mass around it’s eye. We anesthetized her and took a biopsy. Hopefully we’ll know soon what this mass is.

I don’t have pictures, but we’ve also went to surgery to repair a broadwing hawk humerus and a red-tail hawk ulna, went to surgery to remove hooks from the stomachs of another painted turtle and a black-backed gull. I’ll try to get pictures up soon.

Take care back in the Midwest! I’ll post soon again!

Off to MA!

Sorry this entry is a little late--let's just pretend it's July 27th;)

Leaving The Wilds was sad, but getting back into wildlife rehab is going to be amazing!! I'm so excited!

I left Cumberland, OH at 7am saturday morning. I didn't stop to sight see, but i did stop often to walk around get a snack. Here are a couple of the more interesting signs i saw:



a) peace, love and bbq??? last time i checked, bbq contained slaughtered pig, which isn't exactly all about peace and love....ha
b) bbq is good....good thing they put it on the sign or i would have driven right by thinking bbq was bad.
c) there is a special place in my rage box just for cannibalistic marketing ploys. idiots.

so that was fun.

Later, i drove by one of those "road-side" zoos that are usually horrible, horrible places for animals to live. This one had a good outer appearance, but i was curious as to how horrible the living conditions were. I asked "Can i ask where you get your animals from?" She replies, "oh they've had a lot for a long time; i think they get a bunch from auctions and sales."
I can almost guarantee now that the enclosures are too small, the animals malnourished, and that there is no enrichment for the animals. But they wouldn't let me in with out paying $8, which is bs. So i grabbed a brochure with a revengeful look on my face. "Ha! That's $1.50 you'll never be seeing again!" take that stupid unregulated road-side zoo of misery.

As I drove through New York, I saw this sign and almost died:



Oh no, your glasses aren't dirty, you aren't having a dream and you are not intoxicated. New York has somehow known about me my whole life! A deli in my honor! The only problem is when i went inside, a beer-belly man with sweaty pits was manning the deli which was only a counter in a gas station and they didn't sell t-shirts. oh well; i guess everyday can't be "nay day".

And so, After 13 hours of driving I arrive in Grafton, MA. Not too exhausted, and very ready to get back into wildlife medicine!