Tuesday, December 23

Today was my first day at location B. Dr. S told me that the two locations were very different, and she was right! They're run exactly the same, of course, with the same uniform required of techs and that sort of thing but the clients are totally different and as such, the atmosphere in the clinic is different too. The staff are different too, in my opinion - mainly in the way that they seem to be more laid-back. I spent a lot of time with one of the techs today while Dr. S bustled in and out of appointments. I went in and out of rooms with her too but also spent time practicing and learning skills with the tech. I gave an injection of morphine to a dog to prep for her dental. She was an obese, long haired Chihuahua and Dr. S ended up having to pull about four teeth on her. One was a molar. Two she was able to extract manually and two she had to extract surgically. It was neat to watch - I've never seen a surgical extraction before. It was even cooler because the surgical extractions were performed on two molars which had three roots as opposed to just one.

When that was finished, Dr. S did a neuter on a Red Heeler (a red Australian Cattle Dog). That was a lot of fun to watch because I was basically one-on-one with Dr. S. The whole process (suturing included) took about ten minutes...and that was just because she was talking me through what she was doing. Dr. S seems to move pretty quickly without sacrificing quality...there is a lot I can learn from her about efficiency. I know part of it just has to do with the fact that she is a person who is naturally good at multitasking. I'm really enjoying myself here. After Dr. S finished with the neuter, she allowed me to cut open one of the testicles. I asked for permission to do so because I was interested in handling a dog testicle...I've examined large animal repro tracks but never small animal repro tracks (aside from in pictures). Also, I took Reproductive Physiology last semester and became familiar with the anatomy of the testicle so I was eager to do a bit of disecting. I didn't do much destruction, I just removed all of the layers until I was down to the pure contents of the testicle. I examined them, "ooo"ed and "awww"ed and then disposed of them. That was a pretty neat conclusion to the morning.