Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Surgery Day

Whew I am exhausted! 16+ hour days and just constantly going has really started to wear us down. Yesterday I was in anesthesia all day. I planned to write a little bit about it last night, but at the last minute I found out my schedule assignment for today was changed to surgery and decided that I had better spend that time practicing sutures and sleeping instead. Anesthesia was fun. I feel pretty comfortable with monitoring now that I've taken the class and have had some field experience in vet clinics. Hopefully my skills continue to improve over the next week to make me an even better anesthetist this fall. My first three patients were challenging anesthesia cases but my last case maintained vital signs and appropriate anesthetic depth really well. Often times we are spending 3+ hours with our cases from when we are assigned to them through recovery, because it tends to take awhile for them to wake up using this particular drug protocol.

Today was my RAVS surgery day. There are 5 students assigned to surgery per day and all surgeries are done with the supervision and assistance of a surgeon. My three cases were a dog spay, cat spay, and dog neuter. I got to practice my ligatures today which was really helpful and I think it has set me up well for this fall. It's pretty unlikely that I will spend another day in surgery before the end of the trip, but I don't mind. Give the nature and complexity of some of our patients, we often seem to have a lot of down time between surgeries and I really enjoy interacting with clients.

No comments:

Post a Comment