Life and times of a freshly minted veterinarian, practicing in a busy small animal clinic and learning the ropes.I'm interested in small animals, exotic animals, and zoo medicine. However, I'm happy doing almost anything in this field.
Abdominocentesis, or removal of free fluid from the abdomen. This dog is most likely in heart failure. When the heart cannot pump effectively, fluid backs up. It may back up into the veins of the liver, and increased pressure can cause that fluid to be squeezed out into the abdominal cavity. A fluid-distended belly is very uncomfortable and makes breathing difficult. Other causes of fluid in the abdomen include ruptured masses, ruptured hollow organs (gallbladder, intestine, bladder), and lack of protein in the blood.
The upper left photo shows dark fluid on ultrasound. The upper right shows my hand placing a butterfly catheter in the area of greatest fluid on ultrasound. The bottom left shows an assistant pulling fluid out, and the bottom right shows the accumulation. We collected 1200ml (over one liter) from a 38 pound dog, who weighed 3 pounds less after the procedure. I started him on heart medication and diuretics, and his owner reports he is feeling better.
The first rattlesnake envenomation victim of the year :(
Rattlesnake envenomation results in massive swelling to the site of the bite, due to increases in vascular permeability that cause fluid to leak out of the veins. It also causes toxicity to red blood cells, resulting in temporary echinocytosis, seen in the second photo: where the red blood cells, instead of looking nice and round, turn into burrs. Rattlesnake venom also causes problems with coagulation, which can cause massive bleeding due to loss of platelets and clotting factors.
This patient was lucky, surviving her bite with supportive care only. Antivenin is the gold standard of care, but is also very expensive, costing upwards of $400-$500 per bottle as the clinic cost. A large dog could require 5-10 vials. Luckily this dog is improving, and hopefully she will learn her lesson to avoid the snakes in future. However, vets do see some repeat customers!
This 40-pound dog had one of the worst mouths I’d seen in a non-Yorkie, Dachshund, or Shih Tzu. Her carnassial tooth, the large premolar seen in the first photo, was literally teetering with the slightest touch. That tooth is highly feared by veterinarians, as every vet has a horror story about this massive, three-rooted tooth. It’s one of the most difficult teeth to remove due to having three solid portions, so that even if one root has an abscess and would be easy to remove, the other roots tend to be solid. Everyone has accidentally cracked one of those roots, or spent an hour sweating trying to get the tooth to budge. And for her tooth to be sooooo loose I could remove it in 10 seconds? Now that is serious periodontal disease.
I removed a total of 8 teeth from her - all four of her largest chewing teeth, a premolar, and some molars that fell right out. The procedure took 4 hours but the owner reports that now she has a wonderful appetite for the first time in years. Please don’t let your pet’s mouth look like this!
A possible spindle cell sarcoma removed from the leg of a dog. The mass was ulcerated and bleeding, which necessitated rapid removal. The owners declined to send it to the lab for histopathology and definitive diagnosis, but when an in-house cytology was checked, suspicious spindle-shaped cells were seen.
Spindle cell sarcomas are typically locally aggressive, malignant cancers that can infiltrate deep into surrounding tissue on a microscopic level. Their removal is often incomplete due to this aggressive behavior. They tend to recur once removed unless radiation therapy is performed on the site.
dddayne asked: Hi, I'm still a junior in highschool and I want to be a vet. Any tips? How was school where'd you go?
A couple things to work on before applying to vet school are as follows:
1) Funding. Consider how to best get into vet school to come out with the least amount of student loan debt. This may mean taking your college courses at a state school and going to a state veterinary school. There are also some options of going into the Army to get school paid for, or programs where you work in a rural area and have some debt forgiven. Many vets start with 6 or 7 or 8 times their salary as the amount of debt they have, which is a crushing amount, so consider it carefully.
2) Do well in your required science classes, of course.
3) Don’t neglect extracurriculars: vet schools like a well-rounded student.
4) Obtain a variety of animal experience. 2000 hours of cat and dog veterinary experience isn’t as appealing to admissions as 1000 hours of cat and dog, 500 hours of horse and cow, 200 of exotics, and 300 in an animal laboratory.
I really enjoyed my veterinary school, Western University, and its unique problem-based learning curriculum instead of just lectures. However, it was very expensive, which was a big downside. Ultimately I’m glad I went there but the choice is very individual.
rainbowcatvomit asked: We had a case similar to that at the Hospital I work at, except it was the Lyme Vx, and the dog's face swelled pretty badly. Usually we always offer an injection of diphenhydramine before administering any vaccines. I'm glad that in your case that the dog had the reaction as they were checking out and not after the client left, and I'm glad she was okay.
Yeah, it’s hard to know who will have a reaction, and who won’t. Pugs, Chihuahuas, and Dachshunds are all prone to it, but any breed can have it happen, it depends on the individual.
Anonymous asked: hi! am i able to ask you vet-related questions?
Sure! I do have to admit I am not quite as good about answering my messages as I would like to be (part of that is that Tumblr on my computer won’t let me answer messages) but you can certainly send questions in.
Nasty rod bacteria from a dog’s ear. Rod bacteria, like Pseudomonas, are not normal inhabitants of the skin the way that cocci (round) bacteria usually are. When there are rods in an ear, it usually means that it is a secondary infection, where the ear was colonized first with excess yeast or cocci, and then opportunistic rods were able to flourish in the irritated environment. Rod infections are usually treated with strong topical antibiotics such as enrofloxacin (Baytril), but may be very difficult to eradicate.
My very first pyometra case! This was in a 3-year-old unspayed cat. She weighed under six pounds and her pus-filled uterus weighed 140 grams, or 0.3 lbs. The clothespin in this photo is for scale.
Pyometra, an infection of the uterus, occurs in cats and dogs when their ovaries produce hormones at an inappropriate time in their cycle. This causes the cervix to open when it shouldn’t. Bacteria from the outside, such as E. coli from the nearby anus, may travel into the vagina and then into the uterus. The uterus has little in the way of natural defense, and will fill up with inflammatory cells and bacteria. This is usually fatal if untreated, as the uterus can close up and create a ticking time bomb - if it ruptures, it’s septic peritonitis and game over. Cats are usually less systemically ill than dogs, but both can die. Medical treatment with hormones and antibiotics can be attempted in valuable breeding animals, but immediate spay surgery is the best option.
Of course, when you’re cutting the uterus out you do have to take care not to explode that whole thing, which feels like a turgid, angry sausage… It was rather nerve-wracking! Especially the initial incision into the abdomen, which was a WHOOP THERE IT IS moment.
So please, if you know you aren’t breeding your female pets, spay them!
Trim your kitty’s nails! Unfortunately I was in middle school when we got my cat Charlotte, so I didn’t know you should trim your cat’s nails. As a 15.5-year-old cat, she hates having her feet touched; however, I still make it a point to trim the odd nail when I can, since long nails can grow into their paw pads. The dewclaws are at greatest risk of doing this, since they are rarely used when the cat scratches with their nails. This is often a problem in senior cats especially, who may sleep more or have arthritis hindering their scratching behavior.
Managed to trim several nails from Charlotte when she was dozing today. Victory!
We removed this poor old dog’s eye, and when we opened it up, it was full of a semi-solid, black goo that we made a smear of. The second image is what we saw in the microscope. It looked almost identical to the picture of a melanoma in our cytology text. The Idexx histology report confirmed that it was a melanoma, but couldn’t say if it was malignant or benign :(
too cool! i love taking pictures of what i see on microscopes haha
Mouse Eyeball Cells
Researchers stained ultra-thin slices of a mouse’s eye to create this first-place photography winner.
The stain was made of three antibodies that bind to three different molecules present in all cells, but in differing concentrations. Assigning red, blue and green to each antibody allowed the creators to depict more than 70 different cell types in the organ.
Image: Bryan William Jones/University of Utah/Moran Eye Center
(via pre-vet)
For interviews from individual schools click here.
There seem to be six main categories of questions -
When you have an eye that’s red and painful and the dog is already blind, what do you do? Go on and remove it, that’s what.
The dog is doing great and no longer has a constant source of pain from a defunct organ. The surgery is fairly easy but you do have to do some delicate tissue handling when severing the eye from the optic nerve.
My precious kitty, Jax has had a rough week, you may have seen some of my angsty posts about it.
Basically, he contracted a very dangerous infectious disease, it was a life-or-death situation and after five days of very intensive medical care, he has come home for recovery. He is far from out of the woods just yet, but we are working to get him back to the healthy cat he was a week ago.
Unfortunately his medical bills are rather ridiculous, several thousand dollars and my parents are struggling to come up with even a fraction of the money. I have created a donation page to ask for help, you can read more about his story here or click on the picture.
If you can give, absolutely anything helps. If you can’t give, I understand, but please reblog this to raise awareness!
If nothing else, be careful if you have cats that hunt rabbits, especially in the state of Virginia, at least one has been found positive of Tularemia, aka Rabbit Fever.
(via cinnamonhippo)
