#suture practice

vet-and-wild here.

We were given suture pads for practice. They’re these square squishy things that have a layer of “skin” and a “subcutaneous layer”.

GV here.

We got to practice suturing during the suture lab in our small animal surgery course. That was about it for us. We used the suture pads that vet-and-wild refers to, but only for those couple of hours during the instruction period. The week after that we had to demonstrate that we had learned them, but other than the straight technique we learned and demonstrated in that one class period, the actual *practicing* occurred on our surgical patients and anything that we got to help suture during rotations such as lacerations, spays/neuters, and sometimes if an animal was very stable and had a fairly “routine” surgery we would be allowed to suture them up after the surgeons were done with the surgery.

Sueanoi here.

We made our own practice board from wood, gauze and tape. Here’s a picture of mine.

The purple spot represents an orifice to practice a purse-string suture on,

Ferox here,

First attempt at a continuous over and over suture. Need to work on making sure my distance between each go is even, also making sure my bites on each side are the same distance, I seem to grab more at the bottom than the top. I think there's a bit too much tension too, you can kinda see how the thread is like denting/digging into the flesh.

All in all I think it's a pretty good first go, suturing the fake skin feels so different from practicing on fabrics, there's so much resistance.