Vet Student at Košice

Vet school is rapidly coming to an end for me, as of writing this, I only have 101 days until I graduate!  2024 started quite early - in January we had two weeks of lectures in the subject "Professional Communication", which was aimed mostly at helping students prepared for their thesis defence, and a little about job interviews. Long time readers will know that I defended my thesis a year early , so the lectures weren't super useful to me. They were spaced out enough that I was able to go home for a few days which was nice, because there wasn't time during the horse block! Onto that - in order of difficulty, I would rank the states from hardest to "easiest" as smalls, horses, ruminants and lastly pigs. In terms of hours, the horses schedule is probably the most intense, with 2 weeks of clinic hours and 3 weeks of lectures, leaving 2 weeks of free time to study. The lectures were mostly interesting, although we did have a few repeats and one of our professor...

As mentioned in my previous post, I didn't have uni on Monday or Tuesday this week. I spent a bit of time catching up on sleep and housework. On Wednesday, I didn't have to be in uni until 1225, so I went to the library to do some work. The normal room I work in was shut off because there was a book fair for medical textbooks, so I sat on the armchairs and worked on my thesis for a little bit. I also did a lesson in my Slovak A1 course, then it was time to go to ruminants. We examined some calves, then spoke about one of the patients - a cow who came in with a suspected left diplaced abomasum. It turns out she didn't have an LDA, but instead ruminal atony and severe dehydration. She was also 8 months pregnant. She was given aggressive fluid therapy, and she seemed to recover, and then very unexpectedly gave birth to her calf 3 weeks early, with no warning signs. The calf was very small, and died very soon after birth so it's suspected there was some pathological process...

This week was probably the busiest of the semester. Granted, I did make is busier for myself, and I got a little ill towards the end, but I really enjoyed it.  This was my timetable for this week, it's defintely the busiest week I've had so far! Monday was the classic all-online day. We had our first credit test of the semester, in Internal Diseases of Small Animals. This test was foccused on just dermatology, and was online so it wasn't too awful. Several of the questions were similar to past paper questions, which is always a bonus. Monday was also a half-day because they were electing a new Rector of the University. I think our exotics teacher missed the email, because we had that lecture anyway, but only about 10 people showed up! I already wrote about my Tuesday of this week in this blog post - so much happened, it would have made my weekly update gigantic! On Wednesday, I had my final Epizootology field trip. This time we went to the sheep farm to test for mastitis i...

This year, we have to do 30 hours in the ruminant clinic this year. We were all assigned a specific week where we have to do all our hours.  One of the patients We pre-arranged days to meet the vet to get our hours. We'd come in and do TPRs on the patients, and throughout the week there would be specific treatments and things we needed to do, like coprological examinations. We were then assigned a specific patient to write a report about - I chose Izabela the goat.  My goat was scheduled for a mastectomy on Thursday - I got to monitor the anaesthesia for it, which is something that I really enjoy. I only had my stethoscope and a watch to measure everything though. In an ideal world, I'd have all sorts of monitoring equipment, but that's not always practical. We sedated her with Xylazine, then used Ketamine to induce anaesthesia. Both were given IM, and throughout the procedure I would periodically top up the doses. We also gave her ketoprofen. She was given an epidural, usi...

Just a small update on two of the cases from the exotics clinic yesterday that I wrote about yesterday . Chameleon: The chameleon had metabolic bone disease (MBD) from poor husbandry. This is from a calcium deficiency in the diet, and excess phosphorus - she was fed almost exclusively crickets. She had pathological fractures in all her limbs, and was unable to lay eggs, leading to her being egg-bound.  She was euthanised.  Rabbit: She died on 26/10, after a sudden seizure. When palpating her abdomen, several masses were present. The vet is going to call the owner and ask for a post-mortem examination. It seems likely that she had sepsis or maybe enterotoxemia (from overgrowth of "bad" bacteria after oral administration of antibiotics that wiped out the physiological flora).  I don't think the vet had a treatment plan for her past treating the abscesses. Since the abscess started at the root of a molar tooth and spread, most of the mandible was destroyed. The teeth couldn...

This Tuesday was so busy!!! I woke up at time-to-leave-o'clock, and had to rush into uni for my first practical, Food Inspection, at 0730. We normally it a bit later in the day, but because of other timetable changes, it got shifted to earlier in the day. It was pretty interesting, we were learning about how food producing places get approved and registered to produce food for human consumption.  We finished a little bit early, so I could go to the pharmacy building at get a much needed coffee. That break didn't last long because my friend and I realised we could go into the Exotics clinic and watch some surgeries. When we got there, they had just started to spay an African Pygmy Hedgehog. She was only around 3 years old, and had masses in her uterus, so it had to come out. The teacher told us about the "007 rule", where you can use 0.07mg/kg medetomidine as a sort of general dose for most animals. Will do a bit of research into that, but interesting nonetheless.  Th...