Thursday, December 18

Today was my first day to shadow. Dr. S ended up not being there because she had a doctor's appointment, so instead I shadowed Dr. D for the day. I had a great time with an interesting case. Early in the day, things were slow so I spent time talking with Dr. D and looking through some of the textbooks they've got in their "mini-library." I also gave a couple of injections which really isn't anything new to me - one subcutaneous (sub-q) and one intramuscular (IM). The sub-q injections were vaccinations and the IM injection was morphine I believe. Then later in the day, a 17 year old potbelly pig came in. He was severely underweight and had stopped eating (hence him being underweight). He also had two abscesses on his lower lip. [SIDENOTE: An abscess is an area where pus is collecting due to an infection in the tissue] We knew we were going to have to look at his mouth and we knew it was going to be bad...but it turned out to be HORRIBLE. For starters, one of his teeth had grown up out of his mouth and THROUGH one of the folds in his face. Once inside, the first tooth Dr. D pulled out was a tusk...which is NOT supposed to be loose enough to come out in the first place, much less as easily as Dr. D was able to pull it out. He did get a lot of good pictures for studying purposes, though. While probing the mouth he also discovered that one of the abscesses went clear through the pig's jaw. After pulling about five or six teeth and discovering that his other tusk was loose, Dr. D decided it would be inhumane to keep the pig alive what with the poor condition of his mouth so they ended up euthanizing him. I wasn't there for the euthanasia though, I left a little while earlier. I was told that when the pig woke up, he was in a lot of pain and just kept squealing so it was decided that it would be better to put him out of his misery.