Friday, April 17, 2020

Vet School Series: UP, obstetrics and Kalamazoo; living it up on the farm!

I can only write a quick email;

I am eating very well, lamb, lamb hot dogs, this isn't as strange as it might seem because we work with lambs all day (we just think of the really irritating ones that injured us or were reaaaally bad mothers); I've had much wrestling practice, and the comment was once made, if Jesus is our Shepherd, as sheep that means we are really stupid.  They can be very stupid, but also very loving and sweet.  I am developing muscles in places I didn't know existed.  I'm also developing skills in sprinting, wrestling and lunging, not to mention hurdling.

We get to do a lot of vet med, but also a lot of plain old framework (re-filling waters, rebedding hay, etc.. We've done more castrations than I care to remember, and now I feel like a mini pharmacy; we use about 2 drugs, a pain medication (I'm a big fan of this one) and an antibiotic.  We use garbage bags as our surgical field.  Okay, some interesting stories, certainly can't write 'em all up.  In the U.P. (for those of you not from Michigan, this is slang for Upper Peninsula, which could also mean "back woods") in the horizontal rain, about 12:00 AM; there are two of us outside, after a 17 hour day of wrangling, pulling lambs etc. there was another vet student and myself, she's about my size and we are alone.  We saw a light in the sky; a red light/glow like a city.  I said, "oh isn't that a pretty sight, it must be Sault Ste. Marie.  Then we see a light swinging around  and say, "maybe that's the lighthouse, that's cool" then when the woman came to do the midnight to 6 shift, we told her of our neat discovery; she laughs and says that's the maximum security prison about 3 miles away; but don't worry, the escaped prisoners wouldn't want to walk through the swamp.

Procedure-wise, I straightened out a dystocia which had 2 lambs trying to come out at the same time with their heads twisted and mom and the twins are doing fine : ). We have also tried to repair broken legs; done tons of bottle feeding (we now have lambs that think we are mom and call for us and follow us around); fixed a prolapsed uterus (uterus that was inside out) pulled and tried to fix multiple dystopias.  The prolapsed uterus called us to dig back into our minds for something about a wine bottle our professor told us.  We weren't sure if you were supposed to drink wine if you were fixing it, or the wine bottle was somehow involved in the fix.  Times like these inform you as to what you pay attention to in class...

We pulled and worked with many dystocia, humanely euthanized some animals and just made some more comfortable.  After I was trying to work out a difficult dystocia yesterday (Mother's Day), I got a whole new appreciation for natural childbirth; my first response after pulling my wrist and arm of what seemed like a high pressure chamber was, "wow, if that hurts my wrist, how must that feel for her."  I have a whole new appreciation for the crushing pressure and what our mom's went through for us.  Well, we've done a lot more, but I gotta go....meg




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