Equine Dentistry (Shortcourse) Wetlab

Sorry for the several week delay in posts, but us VM2s finished our 2nd round of exams only to start the 3rd round a matter of days later. Hectic schedule! But at long last, Thanksgiving break has arrived! And the last Friday of classes kicked off the AAEP's much anticipated Equine Dentistry wetlab!

Friday evening we had a dinner "meeting" that involved about 3 hours of lecture relating to equine dentistry. We had a wonderful presenter who normally does a 3 day short course but was able to give us a condensed version that consisted of the nearly 3 hours of lecture material Friday evening, followed by 7 hours of mostly hands-on work and a little more lecture on Saturday.

A few of the key points from what was discussed Friday evening:

--The 2 main goals of equine dentistry are to minimize pain and to maintain dentition.

--Exams should be done annually, if <5yo they should be done twice a year, or more frequently with a history of oral/dental problems.

--"Floating" and "Dentistry" are not the same thing- floating is mostly to just prevent mucosal damage, whereas dentistry is a more comprehense exam and more important to the overall health of the animal.

--We covered various equine oral pathologies of the hard & soft tissues, including:
Overgrowths, bone growth disparities, maleruptions, supernumerary teeth, oligodontia, infundibular cavities, dental fractures, neoplasia of HT, dysplasia, EOTRH, periodontal disease, pulpar disease, secondary mucosal trauma, neoplasia of ST, and foreign bodies.

--Also covered was equine oral anatomy- physical and functional, and the 8 parts of an oral exam.

• 1-History
• 2-PE (including external head for symmetry)
• 3-Sedation
• 4-Placement o full mouth speculum/lavage
• 5-Visual Exam of mouth (with & without intraoral mirror)
• 6-Palpation of tooth surfaces
• 7-Periodontal probing & use of explorer
• 8-Records of findings on dental chart

Saturday morning we began with live horses (belonging to one of the supervising DVMs). In groups we got to prep the horse, go through the steps of the exam and take turns working on the teeth. I was fortunate enough to do all of the work on the 400's (the horse's lower right teeth) of the first horse. It was such a great hands-on opportunity! Especially since I will likely never do any equine dentistry ever again (I'm a small animal gal & the heavy equipment doesn't do my carpal tunnel any good!). I've even got a picture of me working away, with supervision and guidance from the horse's owner (the aforementioned vet) and  the veterinary presenter. I got to wear a pretty sweet (incredibly old) headlamp, which is not visible in this photo (sorry!).

In total, it took my team of 4 vet students about 1.5hours to complete a dental exam & work to the satisfaction of the presenter. He was a stickler for detail and I appreciated that. We all had to go back in a second time to do a better job, some had to go back a 3rd! (thankfully, I got mine in 2!).

It's pretty nerve-wracking to use heavy power tools inside a living, breathing horse's mouth for the first time! Especially for somebody who has never even seen the inside of a live horse's mouth before, let alone stuck their arm in one (and is also a little terrified by horses!). Everyone had a great time and learned a ton...

Four horses were worked on during the morning and we got to see a few interesting dental problems as well as gain a great appreciation for what is normal and how good dental work should look in the end.

The afternoon brought a quick lunch break and a short lecture break that included a pretty cool video depicting oral anatomy of the horse. We also touched on floating techniques, nerve blocking, and looked at a few cases. Afterwards we concluded with some cadaver heads where we could safely practice nerve blocks, practice with some hand-float tools, and do some more oral exams.

It was a pretty long and intense wet lab, but I gained a wealth of knowledge that I would probably not have received much on (especially since I'm following a small animal track) that I can thankfully refer back to someday should I ever find myself looking at a horse- you never know!

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*I have tried to exclude names and faces to keep individuals anonymous, as well as not providing specific details from our lecture due to copyright constraints. Also, should anything here be incorrect, I am working from some quickly jotted notes that may be a little erroneous. Gotta throw my disclaimers out there ;) *

Crush 'em & Cut 'em - I can relate!

The Saturday before last it was that much awaited time again- Castration Wet Lab!

The SCAAEP (student chapter of the American Association of Equine Practitioners) held their annual Fall castration wetlab- a great opportunity for hands-on experience for its members. The set-up is that People from the surrounding area are recruited to bring in foals (and one guy brings in donkeys) to be castrated by the student. Usually a group of one VM1 (restrain, PE), VM2 (drugs, catheterization), VM3 (castration) work with each animal. There was a new system this year that allowed constant physician supervision with every step of the process, which was great (aside from it taking a whole... lot longer). It really is a wonderful, and very popular wet lab but I don't have much more to say about it than that. If any of you have further questions- just shoot me a comment and I'd be happy to answer them. Otherwise it's all pretty straight-forward what happens - crush 'em and cut 'em ;)


In other news:

The last two weeks have been a doozy! Round 2 of exams for us VM2s. We had an exam on Wednesday, an exam Friday, and exam Monday, 2 Exams Thursday and one more this upcoming Monday. YIKES! The following week it starts back up all over again... we had 2 weeks off since the first round, we don't even get a full week this time. It gets pretty brutal- but that pretty much applies to all of vet school. Brutal.

You know you're a vet student when you lose track of the days, forget the last time you showered, haven't eaten a proper meal in the last week and are running on caffeine and the occasional "nap". You also get really excited about having time to run errands and clean! Errands have never been so much fun!

That being said, I took last night off to, yes- run errands, and have a nice sit down/eating out dinner of sushi (an appropriate meal after a week of Microbiology and Parasitology exams) and finish up my Halloween costume while watching some scary movies. Vet school party is tonight- and vet students know how to party! "Work hard-Party hard"-- the unofficial slogan of vet school. I'm not the "party hard" type, but that won't stop me from going out all costumed and have a good time!

On a side note- eating out with veterinary students is always fun. We listed every microbe & parasite that could possibly be in the components of our sushi rolls (even the rice & cucumber weren't safe from our scrutiny!), and compared things to Pathologic lesions. Too bad we didn't have any non-veteriny friends along to be completely grossed out by our conversation.

Back to the grind this weekend.

Feral Cat Alliance: TNR and Eartipping

For those of you not familiar with TNR- eartipping is not some strange variation of cow tipping! ;)

Last Saturday I had the great luck of having my fourth experience with the FCA- Feral Cat Alliance- an organization here at the CVM that holds spay/neuter clinics roughly once a month to contribute to TNR efforts in the area. If you are unfamiliar with TNR programs, you're not so different from me, not so long ago. TNR programs and I go way back.

Back in the tail-end of my undergrad days I was approached by a faculty member who wanted to begin a TNR program for the feral cat community living on campus. My response was "Great!"- but what the heck is TNR? We have feral cats on campus? A whole community of them..?

Essentially I was tasked to start an official TNR program (JCats) for the school- solo. I had my work cut out for me, but that's a whole different story. Bottom line is I spent many hours first figuring out what all of these basic concepts were, then researching local laws/regulations/etc that may pertain to these cats and whether or not what we wanted to do was legal. The major resource for our little TNR program was AllieCatAllies- a great place to go if you want to learn more about the particulars and ways you can get involved and help!

The basics are this:
TNR= Trap-Neuter-Return
Feral cats, or domestic breed cats living in "wild" (feral) communities, can be found just about anywhere- from farms to the center of major metropolitan cities. These cats can be considered a nuisance, public health concern, and threat to local wildlife (birds, small mammals, the like) - in some cases. Many people want to simply find a way to remove or kill the community of cats and be rid of them, but that is not the solution. If there are the right resources to support this cat community, and you get rid of it, those resources become available to the next cats that happen upon it (and sooner or later, they will happen upon it!). But if you leave them  to their own devices they will continue to breed and that is problematic as well. Now here's where the TNR part comes in- if you Trap these cats (especially the females), spay/neuter them, and then Return them to their community- you will not be opening up new spaces for more cats and you will be slowing & hopefully nearly preventing reproduction. This way, you end up with a fairly stable number of cats in the community and can also clean them up, vaccinate them against disease, check them for serious medical problems like Feline Leukemia-- and ultimately end up with healthier cats that are less of a public health concern.

The great thing about FCA is it is 100% run by the veterinary students (with DVM supervision) and allows you to get in some excellent, precious, valuable hands-on experience! What you do depends greatly on what you are experienced with coming into the clinic, what you are comfortable doing, and the skill level of the other members of your group. There are floating vet techs, Drug officers, Recovery people, and "groups" that do all of the rest. In groups you do some bloodwork, vaccines, surgical prep, surgery, anesthesia, and everything in between. One of the last things you do before you send your cat to recovery is to eartip them. The purpose of eartipping is make the cat easily identified as having been spayed/neutered already. This is actually the exact image we have up in the clinics-- slicing a small tip of the left ear off. (This is common practice and the cats are sedated/well medicated)

Once these cats are recovered they are able to sent back home later that day and re-released to their communities! I think TNR programs are greatly beneficial and there are so many ways you can get involved if it interests you.

Censorship or not- here it is.

Greetings to any who still follow me or happen upon this blog!

So it's been about a year since my last entry and that entry stated I was hesitant to make future posts because "during orientation it was heavily drilled into me that posting any details online pertaining to school was basically... strictly forbidden. So I will be carefully censoring any information I share on here in the future- my further apologies. But fear not! I will still share plenty!" And obviously my declaration to post regardless fell through.

I recently received a comment on that blog post stating: "Since you have apparently abandoned your blog, I can only assume they succeeded in scaring you off" Firstly, I would like to address this by saying VM1 year got ridiculously demanding and I- a) didn't have time to keep blogging & b) forgot about my blog altogether haha So my reply is- No- no they did not scare me off, the blog just died of natural causes with inconvenient timing.

What prompted me to attempt to start this blog up again with this post is the irony of the situation in which I read that comment- it was during my Ethics course where we once again received the "No online sharing of informationg" lecture. The exact same lecture, by the exact same lecturer that I referenced from during my Orientation. AGAIN! During a class in which it was highly irrelevant (so I became highly irritated). The reason given for not sharing informationg regarding the school, the curriculum, etc was:

"To protect the university and programs because the general public does not understand the context"

 

Now, this is in all fairness a valid concern, even my own mother (a nurse, who obviously knows what medical training entails and knows what her daughter is going to school for) is often disturbed to hear any mention of what it is I actually do at school. Although, she is highly sensitive about sick/injured/dead animals (she cries over roadkill, for example). The point I'm getting at is- some people are easily offended, appalled and/or emotionally distraught over some of the practices that take place during a veterinary education (whether that reaction is warranted or rational- or not). It's understandable. And there are crazy animal rights extremists out there with no appreciation for the educational aspect that want to see many of these practices ended at the cost of our education.However, all of the lectures about censoring what we share publicly is getting to be overkill and frankly, a little insulting. Do some veterinary students say or do or post completely idiotic things they shouldn't have? Absolutely. But does that mean that's what the majority of us do? No. They are addressing the exceptions and I feel like those people will make those choices regardless of hearing these censorship lectures or not. People need to just use some common sense and we wouldn't have these problems.

 

*As a disclosure- these are simply my opinions & do not reflect that of the university I am affiliated with ;) Also, I am not implying any practices that take place during my education are cruel, inhumane, or an objectionable practice in any way/shape/form.*

 

Now that that is addressed, I would like to say I will make every effort to keep this blog relatively active in the future- but life has no guarantees and VM2 year is pretty brutal with the work load.

 

Keep on truckin...

Life and Living the Dream!

Greetings from Vet school :)

Apologies for not updating sooner but life doesn't always go as planned.

I moved out to Iowa the first week of August with the help of my Dad. He drove the U-haul and planned to stay an additional 2 days to work on unloading and minor assembly/repair projects around the trailer. His 3rd night here he had a stroke in the middle of the night and I took him to the emergency room when I got up the following morning and had realized what happened. Long story short he got transferred to Mayo where they discovered he had a heavily calcified mitral valve & annulus. A few small bits of calcification had broken off and hit 3 separate spots in his brain- which had the cumulative effect of a minor stroke and about 12+ hours of memory loss. He was able to be discharged just in time to come for my white coat ceremony, then last Friday he had his open-heart surgery to repair/scrape the annulus and replace the mitral valve with a new mechanical one. I am happy to say it went well and he and my mother finally made it back home today.

Needless to say it was a rough start to my first days in veterinary school. Things are starting to settle down for me now in terms of stress but I'm feeling a little behind from all the personal chaos.

I was also a little hesitant to post here because during orientation it was heavily drilled into me that posting any details online pertaining to school was basically... strictly forbidden. So I will be carefully censoring any information I share on here in the future- my further apologies. But fear not! I will still share plenty!

Orientation was 3 very longs days of every minute scheduled with lectures and activities from 8-5. Mostly people talking at me with useless information and MANY MANY team-buildingesque activites. Surprisingly little helpful information. Or not so surprisingly.

Class schedules are pre-determined. I have: Cell/Molecular biology, Histology, Anatomy, Nutrition, Clinical Foundations, Case Studies I, Radiology (Clinical Imaging), Veterinarians in Society, Freshman Seminar Series, and accompanying labs to Histo, Anatomy,  & ClinicFndtns.

A lot of the material is fairly review-based in nature. Anatomy is A LOT & FAST. Clinical Foundations just throws you in with little to no real instruction.

I am coming up to my first exam which will be in Anatomy on Thursday.

It's a little daunting. The lecture and lab are combined for the exam and over the cat and dog- muscles and bones. I mean complete and total knowledge of the muscles, bones, joints/joint capsules, tendons, and ligaments-also the insertions, attachments, and functions- of the cat and the dog in just 3 weeks. (Get what I mean by a lot and fast?) The difficulty is in how much information is thrown at you and how quickly you are expected to know it and move on to new material (pretty much one day from forelimb bones to muscles to hindlimb bones, & so forth...).

I'll plan to start discussing clubs/organizations next post- if I survive this week! ;)