Last Day of Vet Work :(

My final day out with Doc this Summer was a great one. We started the morning with my two horses. Doc showed me (and let me under careful supervision) sedate my own horse, give her her injections, and float her teeth. This is the first time I have ever done a tooth floating, and boy is it hard! But I enjoyed the effort and learning the angles and tools. Doc had to finish it off for me because I took so long that Sweets started to wake up! She was shaking her head like a dog to try to wake up from the sedation- which was somewhat dangerous as my arm was in her mouth and she very likely could have cracked either me or Doc on the head. It is not a reaction I have seen very commonly with horses, but it is a normal reaction for sedation. Sweets has hooks in her mouth (spots where there are no teeth on the upper/lower side of the jaw to grind against the lower/upper molars and keep them short), but this year they were not as bad as they were last year. Last year they had to be ground down with a Drumel tool, but we were able to hand float them today. I also found out that my horse has a slight arrhythmia, where her heart beats three times and then pauses, then beats three times and pauses. The pause is in time with her breathing, and this makes it a rather common arrhythmia. It is also regular- meaning the pattern did not change when I was listening to it. Doc said it was no big deal and that a lot of horses had it.

Blossom, my mother's horse, did great. She is normally terrified of shots and everything else, but she was awesome today. She got a shot of tri-histamines before she got her vaccines since she normally swells up at the injection shot. We also floated her teeth (though I did only about a third of her teeth since she was more awake with the sedation than Sweets had been). Blossom as well had a heart arrhythmia, though hers was a little more serious. I originally heard a steady rhythm, but right before I took the stethoscope away I heard a pause and kept listening. I then heard an stream of random starts and stops- nine beats, a pause, three beats, a pause, two beats, a pause, four beats, etc. So she has an irregular arrhythmia. This means that if she were every put under anesthesia for some sort of surgery she would need to be monitored closely. In the terms of sedation however, she was just fine.

Doc then gave my iron-tail english lab her lyme's and distemper vaccines. So that takes care of my outside pets for the year!

We headed out on the road and stopped by to check on the foal with the crooked legs- his legs are almost perfect now, for they straightened the rest of the way by themselves. We took some blood for a complete blood chemistry workup. And then I found out that the owner had 5 kittens she had just got... If I were superman, kittens would be my cryptonite. Doc wrote up the bill and talked with the owner, and I played with a pile of purring, lovely smelling, wet nosed, soft bundles of love. It was fantastic <3.

Our next two calls were foot abscesses. I quite enjoy podiatry work and learning about the hoof structures, as well as seeing how many things can go wrong just from one hoof- whether it is an abscess, a split, a bad trim, an infection, a bruise or a foreign object. Something wrong with a hoof can put a horse out for years. The first one we looked at was a short little buckskin quarter horse who had had an abscess last year and had just developed one in the same spot. What I found very interesting about this one was that he did not respond to hoof testers (most likely due to the fact that the owners had buted him up), but that Doc found the abscess anyway, just by knowing the history of the horse. It was a large, mud-filled abscess, but was very close to the surface and fairly new. This means that it will heal fairly quickly and without too many complications, though the horse did have some disfigurement of the hoof wall due to the last abscess in that spot.

The second horse was not happy with what was being done, and kept yanking the foot out of Doc's leg-hold, leaving rather painful bruises on him I am sure. Even after we twitched her, that mare did not want to let him have her hoof. And it took awhile, because this abscess was quite the opposite of the previous one. This was about as sucky as it gets- a small hole leading to an abscess right up against the sensitive tissues of the horse's hoof (right next to the frog), and about as deep as you can get as well. Doc had to dig at least 1/2''-1'' to get the pocket opened up. He did this very, very carefully, scraping away layer by layer. He said it is very similar to when you are doing spinal or brain surgery. When he opened it up it smelled foul, and the liquid that drained out was slightly red and murky. Basically it was bloody pus. The mare would have to be kept on stall rest for a week and bandaged for at least 3-4 weeks (Lucky owner there- she gets to deal with that horse every time she changes the bandage!).

A wonderful surprise today was that Doc and Ms. S. took me out to lunch at the restaurant where both my fiance and my brother work (though neither of them happened to be working then). It was incredibly nice of them, and Ms. S. even gave me a gorgeous necklace that she had made for me herself. The colors in it set off my dark-skin, hair and eyes and of course it has a horse on it! It was very thoughtful and I will treasure it.

I suppose I will not have as many animal-related things going on now... I start band camp on Monday morning and will be there until the 21st, so unless anyone really wants to hear about flag twirling, I probably won't be posting too often. After that I am back home ( I commute to school), and will be starting school on the 27th! I will probably be posting about my school life, as well as the various activities I do with the the pre-vet club, classes and marching band. Stick around if you want to hear about my life outside of vet work!

Off for the night,

~Melissa~