Week 4 Day 3

Today was an awesome day, probably one of the best in the three and a half weeks of vet school thus far.  We started out with a lecture on finances and then had rounds and then we had a really neat case.  The horse was having a problem of coughing so we did an endoscopy where we take a camera on a tube and stick it into the horse's nose and then down into its throat and even a little bit into its trachea.  We also got to see the guttural pouch, a canal running from the inner ear to the throat.  The camera magnifies the image so it is really neat.  Then, we had the horse trot inside and then out, and then it was off to the horse treadmill.  We wanted to watch the throat via the endoscope while the animal was running.  The treadmill ran at about 13 meters per second so that horse was really galloping along.  It was kind of tense because  you had the sound of the treadmill plus the horse running and the veterinarians yelling over the treadmill and horse.  This combined with the intensity of a horse in full gallop on a treadmill was an extremely neat experience.  At lunch we talked about the horse with the throat problem and also a horse with colic that had surgery this past Monday.  We also talked a little bit about bandaging legs.  After lunch we observed the horse with the throat problems getting a bronchoalveolar lavage, where they used the endoscope again and also flush about 300mL of fluid into the lungs and then suck it back up.  This is to see if there is anything growing in the lungs causing a problem.  The last thing I got to do today was to nebulize a horse.  We had to give a medication to a miniature horse foal so we had a machine that aerosolized the drug (made it go into the air as droplets) so the horse could breathe it in.  My fourth year student allowed me to add the solutions to the chamber, and then hold the mask up to the foal so that was also kind of neat.  It was an awesome day!