Ortho Day 2

I got to school today around 7am in time for morning rounds where the clinicians and fourth year students do a brief review of each of the cases present in the hospital (only in the ortho ward for us) at that time.  Then at 8am it was off to the clinical skills learning center to learn how to properly open a surgery pack and drape a patient.  After that, we went down to junior surgery suite to watch the third years as they spayed dogs and a few cats.  We were there for a couple of hours and then we headed back to clinical skills learning center to relearn hand ties.  Hand ties are sometimes used to tie sutures when you are in too tight of an area to really get your instruments down there to tie it.  After lunch we hung out a bit in the ortho ward.  I relearned how to find the PCV (packed cell volume which tells you the percentage of red blood cells in a patient's blood) and total protein of the blood.  I had done this back when I worked at the clinic however its been over three years since I've done it so it wasn't real fresh in my mind.  Then, at 2pm it was back to CSLC (I will refer to the clinical skills learning center as CSLC from now on) to relearn our suture patterns from last year as well as learn some new ones.  We even got to try some of them on fake intestines while the rest were done on suturing boards.  The real tissues come out tomorrow and Thursday.  Finally, it was back to the ortho ward for afternoon rounds.  Tomorrow morning I am going to school for 630am as my fourth year student has a dog who has double MLP (medial luxating patellas meaning both its knee caps are out of place) and will be having it surgically repaired tomorrow.  It should hopefully be pretty interesting!