tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51349938215455622052024-03-21T05:46:40.099-04:00The Dog ZombieDogs! Brains! Science!The Dog Zombiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00242246213147009685noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5134993821545562205.post-89400204968293539512010-09-03T15:45:00.000-04:002010-09-03T15:45:24.237-04:00Veterinary fact of the day: changing the face of large animal medicineA few days ago in anesthesia lecture, Dr. Drile announced, “Now we are going to learn about xylazine. All of you in the audience who are women, or men under 200 pounds, can be thankful for this drug.” She then plunged into her lecture on xylazine, and it took several minutes for her to get around to explaining why I should be thankful for it, during which time I was mostly distracted by what a weird introduction that had been.<br />
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Eventually we got to a slide depicting a small woman leading an enormous draft horse, and Dr. Drile explained. Xylazine is a really excellent sedative/tranquilizer, used primarily in large animals (although also sometimes in small animals). Before we had xylazine for chemical restraint, we had to physically restrain these enormous animals in order to do simple procedures on them. This was difficult and dangerous, and if you were a small person, you couldn’t easily do it. Xylazine hit veterinary medicine around the 1970s, which coincides with an increasing influx of women into the field. The estimates vary for women in veterinary medicine now, but we decidedly dominate numerically. In my first year class, there were 70 women and 12 men. My school recently spent a hefty chunk of change to remodel the anatomy building’s changing rooms, to increase the space in the women’s room at the expense of the men’s. There are, of course, lots of reasons why there are so many more women in veterinary medicine now than there used to be, but this was one I hadn’t considered before.<br />
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Thanks to xylazine, veterinary medicine is no longer a wrestling match. I am, accordingly, grateful.<br />
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<i>What I did today:</i> Quiz in zoological medicine (not supposed to be hard, and wasn’t). Gym! Two hours of dermatology lecture (new class, very engaging guest speaker). Lunch! (Went to meeting about how the lottery for scheduling our clinical rotations will work.) One hour of small animal medicine lecture (vaccines). Out super early.The Dog Zombiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00242246213147009685noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5134993821545562205.post-23593386790501544032010-08-28T18:07:00.000-04:002010-08-28T18:07:41.620-04:00Veterinary fact of the day: placing an esophagostomy tubeYesterday we learned the theory of how to place an esophagostomy tube. We saw a video of a tube placement on a cadaver dog, but haven’t actually gotten hands-on experience in this area yet. (We may all get to do so before we graduate, though.)<br />
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What’s an esophagostomy tube? It’s a feeding tube that goes in through an incision in the animal’s neck, into the esophagus. It is used for animals that will not or cannot eat normally, but can keep food down. So you might use it in an animal with bad facial fractures which cannot move its jaw; you would not use it in an animal which had uncontrolled vomiting (all the food would come right back up).<br />
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How do you place it? Put the animal under general anesthesia. Put some forceps into the animal's mouth, into the esophagus. Make an incision in the animal’s neck, right over the esophagus. Poke the foreceps through the esophagus and out the hole in the neck. (Dr. Libbe said at this point: “This part seems kind of scary at first, but it does work!”) The forceps are strong enough to poke through the esophagus and make a hole, but not strong enough to poke through the skin and muscle, which is why you make the incision.<br />
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Take the feeding tube and thread it in through the hole in the neck, grab it with the forceps, and pull in out the animal’s mouth. Now you have a tube from outside of the mouth to outside of the neck — not so useful! So turn the mouth-end of the tube around and thread it back down the esophagus in a little loop. When it passes the incision you’ve made, it will lie a little further down the esophagus, and now it is in place: you have a tube passing from outside the neck to inside the esophagus. Suture the tube in place, and you are all done.<br />
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<i>What I did yesterday:</i> Two hours of zoo medicine lecture (reptiles). Lunch! (I exercised outside; it was a lovely day. I also did my ethics reading.) Two hours of small animal medicine and surgery lecture (nutritional support). Two hours of ethics lecture/discussion (euthanasia). Home!The Dog Zombiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00242246213147009685noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5134993821545562205.post-11411913295702337312010-08-21T12:08:00.000-04:002010-08-21T12:08:10.494-04:00Veterinary fact of the day: chemodectomasThis is actually the veterinary fact of yesterday. During small animal medicine and surgery, a surgeon was discussing chemodectomas, tumors arising from chemoreceptors. A chemoreceptor is a cluster of cells which measures chemical changes in the body, such as oxygen level. The surgeon asserted that brachycephalic dogs (flat-faced dogs, like pugs and bulldogs) get chemodectomas more often than other types of dogs, possibly due to “chronic asphyxiation.” In other words, in his opinon (and that of other veterinarians), the fact that flat-faced dogs can’t really get enough air in through their tiny noses can actually result in cancer.<br />
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I’m not going to talk about the physiology behind how this would work, because we didn’t cover that in class. I will say that I think it is a failing of the veterinary profession as a whole to not discuss these kinds of issues more with people who are deciding what kind of dog to get. “That breed of dog is more likely to get this form of cancer” is a very different statement from “that breed of dog can’t get enough air into its system, which can cause all kinds of problems, including cancer. We should be encouraging breeders to breed a little more snout into these dogs so they can be healthy.”<br />
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<b>What I did yesterday:</b> Two hours of large animal medicine and surgery lecture. Two hours of small animal medicine and surgery lecture. Lunch! (Except I didn’t eat then, because I had a meeting. I ate during:) Two more hours of small animal medicine and surgery lecture. Suture practicing with friends! Gym! Home!The Dog Zombiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00242246213147009685noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5134993821545562205.post-8347489411455590522010-08-19T20:22:00.000-04:002010-08-19T20:22:00.744-04:00Veterinary fact of the day: fish medicineToday we had a lecture on fish medicine. The veterinarian who gave the lecture told us that she went to vet school so that she could work with fish. It must have been frustrating to her to have only two hours total devoted to her species of choice. And here I get frustrated when I have to learn about pigs.<br />
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What should I share with you about fish? Turns out that if you want to draw blood from a fish, you are in trouble; phlebotomy is “not routine” in fish. You can do it with bigger fish (“bigger than a salmon,” she says, assuming we all know exactly how big that is) by drawing from the caudal vein (back near the tail). In smaller fish you have to draw from the heart, which is terminal. So if you have small but valuable fish, you keep an extra to sacrifice (a sentinel animal), for use in diagnosing problems that affect all or most of your animals.<br />
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Valuable fish? Sure, koi can get very valuable. Of course, fish farmers consider their stock to be valuable overall, even if individual animals are not. And laboratory research is done on fish, so you have herd health issues there, too.<br />
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Speaking of research on fish, the lecturer mentioned in passing that you can measure stress in fish by measuring the cortisol in the water. Then she left before I could ask for more information. Here is what went through my head: <i>Cortisol in the water! They must pee it out. Wait, they don’t pee, I bet it comes out of their gills. I bet it is not cortisol, I bet it is cortisol metabolites. Amazing that they use cortisol just like us, not even a cousin like corticosterone. Why do people measure it, I wonder? Some sort of diagnostic reason — to tell if the fish is sick, maybe? Or is it used as part of stress research studies? How similar is the fish HPA to the mammalian HPA?</i> Ah, if only I had time to wander Google Scholar, reading random papers, as I did a week ago.<br />
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<b>What I did today</b><br />
Up extra early. Gym! (It seems to prevent the stress headaches, which I imagine will go away when I readapt to the pace of vet school after a year away from it.) Suture practicing with classmates. Two hours of small animal medicine lecture (the last of the cardio unit). Lunch! (Tried to catch up on science blogs reading.) Two hours of anesthesia lecture. Two hours of zoo medicine lecture (fish medicine). Suture practicing with an ex-classmate who already knows it all. Home!The Dog Zombiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00242246213147009685noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5134993821545562205.post-32618808757010229742010-08-18T17:21:00.000-04:002010-08-18T17:21:53.409-04:00Veterinary fact of the day: innocent murmursA two month old golden retriever puppy comes in for a check up, and the veterinarian auscults (listens to) her heart routinely. The vet hears a murmur, a II out of VI. Lower numbers mean quieter and less serious murmurs, so this one isn’t very loud. Does the veterinarian panic? No! Puppies often do have “innocent” murmurs, most of which go away with age. “Let’s wait and see” is an OK answer here (though not the right one in every case, of course).<br />
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Where do innocent murmurs come from? Puppies have less fat and muscle in their chest walls than adult dogs do, so very soft murmurs are easier to hear. They also have fewer red blood cells, which can make the motion of the blood through their hearts more turbulent, and that can also cause a murmur.<br />
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<b>Disclaimer:</b> I am not a doctor of puppies yet. Please do not make any medical decisions based on these blog posts. <br />
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<b>What I did today:</b> Two hours of anesthesia lecture. Two hours of small animal medicine/surgery lecture. Lunch! (Goofed off and hung out with friends while I ate. Luxury.) Two hours of large animal medicine/surgery lecture. (Calf diarrhea!) Chased down friendly tech, got expired suture for practicing knots and suturing. Gym! Home! Lots of studying tonight, and what will hopefully be the for-reals-last thesis edits.The Dog Zombiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00242246213147009685noreply@blogger.com0