#vethospital

Surgery Rotation

My final rotation of the year! It seems like yesterday that I was following a hand drawn map of the hospital to locate the ophthalmology room for my very first rotation. How far I’ve come!

On this rotation we began with a small group of four students (rather than the usual eight) which was then divided in half, with two students beginning on soft tissue and the other two on orthopaedics. I was assigned to soft tissue surgery for the first week and it was hectic! My buddy and I were run off our feet trying to complete the work of four students. We arrived at 7:30 each morning and didn’t leave until after 7:00 at night when our patient records were completed. Once home, our evenings were spent frantically researching surgical procedures to avoid looking like complete idiots when the specialists inevitably quizzed us the following day.

Students were assigned to cases and responsible for collecting a history during the initial consultation with the owner, performing a physical examination, scrubbing into the surgery, writing a detailed surgical report, looking after the patient in hospital, administering medications, overseeing wound care, recording vitals and the progress of recovery, and eventually discharging the patient. Our ultimate goal was to get our patients through all of those stages and discharged as quickly as possible, to minimise the number of animals in our care and allow us to leave the hospital at a semi-reasonable hour each day.

The Fifth and Final Chapter

After a gruelling six exams in nine days, I was rewarded with one day’s rest, before commencing my fifth and final year of vet school. The past two weeks have been filled with dramatic ups and downs - sleep deprivation, passing my fourth year exams, feeling entirely useless, sending off our newly-graduated friends in the year above, finishing data collection for my research project, and cuddling puppies and kittens when we needed it most. It’s been a steep learning curve and a challenging transition from vet student to ‘veterinarian in training’. This is the year I finally get to put all of my veterinary theory into practice.

We’ve had to rapidly adjust to some pretty big changes already. I now wear a clinic coat and black pants to uni everyday, never part with my trusty stethoscope, and actually get to talk to the public! A whole new world has been unlocked now that my student swipe card allows me to access the teaching hospital. I’m continuously getting lost in the hospital maze, but I’m relieved to have avoided our lecture theatre for almost a month!

Over the next year and a bit, I’ll be rotating through the veterinary hospital, spending time in emergency, production, ophthalmology, dentistry and surgery, to name a few. These rotations will be supplemented with clinical placements, research and exams, just to make sure I stay out of trouble and continue to lack a social life.

Thank you to everyone who has followed my vet school journey from the beginning, and to those who have recently come on board. I’ve decided to update my blog fortnightly over the coming year with the highlights of each rotation, as well as the key things I learn along the way. I hope you enjoy reading about the adventures of a final year vet student!

I had been looking forward to a low-stress and familiar day at work in my regular vet clinic, but soon discovered the nurses had other plans for me. They decided it was the perfect day to teach me to answer the phones. Seems simple enough… until you consider the possibility of dealing with an angry client, emergency or potential euthanasia, not to mention the struggle of tackling the nonsensical computer system. Those were the panicked thoughts running through my head each time I reached for the buzzing phone.

I’ve been told so many times that being a vet is about treating the human as much as the animal, but perhaps I’ve been in denial up until now. It’s ironic considering most people go into the industry because they prefer the company of animals to humans – but dogs don’t have voices or credit cards!