Brrr...its' cold!!

Okay, while I'm typing this my hands are freezing...so pardon any mistakes. Today we don't have any classes, but I will be going in to work this afternoon. It is nice to have a day off from classes so that I can get some things done. (i.e. studying for my tomorrow's test..)
Let's back up to last Tuesday since I said that I would write all about the emergency clinic visit from 6pm-9pm with my Technical Practicum partner, Tammy...There was so much to see and do there! I definitely would recommend any vet tech student to go to an emergency clinic to gain some experience whether you are just observing or volunteering. In three hours I saw & did so many new things. They even said it was one of their slow nights (of course!!!) LOL...I don't know what I would have done if it would have been a busy night...anyways...we got to see a doctor perform an ultrasound on a patient who had hematuria (blood in the urine). The patient, a dog, ended up having a tumor in it's bladder. :( There were several patients there that had OD'd on Ibuprofen. There was a Yorkie dog who had pancreatitis. They were giving it an IV of fresh frozen plasma. We helped check it's vitals every 10 minutes. There was a cat who had pleural effusion (fluid in it's chest). It had difficulty breathing so they had it in an O2 chamber. We got to help withdraw the fluid when the ER vet did a thoracentesis (sp?). We ended up withdrawing around 250ml of rust colored fluid!! No wonder the poor cat couldn't breathe. About 1/2 way into our visit we heard the people up front on the inter comm requesting assistance up front...I knew what that probably meant...sure enough a HBC (hit by car) patient was brought in. It was a black lab with multiple areas of scrapes & an area of actual skin was removed from a section on the top part of its front left leg. Its right front leg was broken in the wrist area. It's shoulder & elbow had various skin removal/abrasions. I was amazed at how calm the dog was though...shock maybe? They had to lift it off the gurney to weigh it & it didn't even whimper. (sniff sniff) The first thing the techs did was insert an IV catheter in its back leg vein (saphenous vein)...because the front leg cephalic veins (preferred veins to catheterize) couldn't be used. (this was a good lesson on why you should know how to catheterize any vein if others aren't available). They gave pain meds & started fluids...we had to leave @ 9pm so we didn't get to find out a verdict on the patient until the next day as one of our fellow students is an assistant there...she said that fortunately the owners had plenty of money. ;o) The dog ended up having the right front paw amputated because all the wrist bones were crushed...other then getting a bunch of stitches & having road burn on the groin area the dog was doing good. Yay!! That's is what we like to hear. :o) I want to see if I can go back to either observe or volunteer there as there are plenty of new things to learn there.
Well, I better stop writing & get back to studying.