Library Assignment

Some professor or other decided that we need practice using the library and its databases, so that we'll be familiar with doing literature searches and whatnot when we're big bad vets. It's a reasonable aim, since most of my classmates probably didn't read a hundred stupid journal articles for their undergraduate senior project like I did. However, the assignment they gave us needs to be sorely rethought.

What we were supposed to do was pick any anatomical structure we wanted, then look up four journal articles about it. We were supposed to write a nice little essay giving a description of the structure and its normal function, and devote a small section to clinical signs of disease and dysfunction. Sounds nice when I put it like that, doesn't it? The catch is that we had to use no more than 150 words. One hundred fifty words! Four references, not counting any textbooks we needed to supplement the anatomy description. 

No more than 25% of the essay was supposed to be about the disease part. 25% of 150 words. 

The thing about primary literature, is that people doing studies don't bother describing their structure of interest, because it's a waste of space. You're not going to be looking up a study of drug effects on the development of auditory ossicles if you have no clue what the fuck an auditory ossicle is. Most literature assumes you actually know the stuff that you were supposed to learn in med school and can easily reference in the textbooks. Studies are going to be about pathology, clinical signs, drugs, that sort of thing. So in practicality, you end up with four references for 25% of a 150 word essay. Not to mention that the citations are included in the word count.

To make matters worse, we have to peer review four other people's (anonymous) essays and hand them back in. Supposedly, by marking someone else, we'll learn how to better improve our own writing. What were they thinking? How could anyone possibly learn anything from a 150 word assignment? Everyone was too busy trying to squeeze unnecessary words out to worry about writing well. The result was choppy sentences and truncated thoughts. This isn't helping us learn to write concisely, and it's not helping us critically assess each other because there's just not much you can say about something so short.

We were supposed to include the word count on the page. I had 151 words and said my count was 150, no big deal. Three of the ones I had to grade also said their word count was 150 words. One of them was a line or two longer than the others. Hmmm.

I counted to be sure. They had 160 words. Nice try.

Describing a Place

Topography sort of means "describing a place," from its Latin roots, and in medicine it means looking at and feeling the surface of the patient and knowing what's up underneath. It's the reason I haven't posted hardly any stories lately (I had Mr Vet saved up to post when things got dire), because it took the form of an oral exam this past week.

The exam consisted of an examiner, a scribe, a dog, and me. The dog's name was Merlin and he looked kind of like this (picture from google):

The first thing I did was pet the dog. The first thing I was actually supposed to do was pick out four cards from different piles, and each one had two questions on it. The way it worked was he would name a structure, and I would palpate it and describe anything I could think of--nearby structures and landmarks, function, clinical significance. The entirety of anatomy examinable, both this year and last, and more than two weeks of study. It took about 10 minutes.

Unfortunately I wasn't just nervous, I was embarrassed about being so nervous. I petted the dog a lot, it didn't help.

The upshot is that now you can pretty much point anywhere on a dog, and I can tell you all kinds of shit about whatever it is you pointed at. 

PS: It is way easier to find the femoral pulse on an alive dog than on a dead one. I was unduly surprised when I felt it.

Mr. Vet

Every year, the third years celebrate "halfway day," which, as you might guess, is the day they are exactly half way through with their degree. This tends to involve a big trip with the whole class going off to do something crazy like sky diving. Halfway day is in the second semester, and they spend pretty much the entire first semester fundraising for it. Doubtless, I will have many stories involving halfway day fundraising, considering the sheer number of events associated with it, and next year my class is the one that's going to be saving up.

One of the first major fundraisers this year was an annual event called Mr. Vet.

You may not be aware, but male vets are an endangered species. In our class of 100, I believe there's less than 20 guys. So in a celebration of manliness, each class votes two representatives to enter the Mr. Vet contest. Since the first years don't start until second semester, that's four classes and eight contestants. There are three stages: formal wear, swim wear, and talent. The contestants are also given a steady supply of alcohol throughout the whole event. They are judged by a panel of vet faculty; if I remember correctly there were two girls and four guys. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a steady supply of alcohol too.

So the show started at 8pm. I got there with my friends at 7:30 and we had to sit way in the back (these are all pictures other people took). I had to sit on my feet and crane my neck a lot and I'm pretty sure I couldn't see a lot of the funny stuff, such as their footwear or anything that happened near the ground.

Since this was the first time for our class, our guys didn't really know what to expect and ended up overshadowed by the upper years. For the formal wear, one had a dress and a beard, and the other was smart enough to give beer bottles to all the judges. Some of the other years were a bit funnier, putting on accents or just having more interesting outfits, but overall the formal wear was just a warm up. One of them thought he was a comedian and reenacted a Rowan Atkinson skit, but he really couldn't pull it off well. Another, not in the picture below, went on in fluorescent green tight pants and sparkly blue jacket, and flirted with the MC (this is important for later).

The swim wear section was much more interesting. One of our guys was the only one awesome enough to wear a bikini, but frankly all of them were hilarious. Almost all the acts included stripping, often of a completely ridiculous outer layer, and some poor dancing. Rowan Atkinson sketch guy got a lot of cheers for his daring G-string attire and triathalon dash and bike up the centre aile before stripping down. They each got to pick a music track to play when they came on, and I'm sorry I can't remember what any of them were now. You can just take my word that it was funny.

The talent section was the longest and had some of the best acts. Unfortunately there was a very marked trend of decreasing quality. The first guy up did an elaborate medley of songs, accompanying himself on the keyboard and with a guitar buddy, in which he had reworded the songs to fill them with vet jokes, references to faculty, and having an overall gay theme. This particular contestant was the same that had the tight green pants in the formal wear, and was now dressed in a nice pink outfit.

I don't remember the order exactly, but one of the next contestants did the classic can't-play-an-instrument-but-actually-is-really-good-at-it spiel. He started off with the good old "I found this violin in the attic and learned Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," played it horribly, got cheered for an encore, then of course played some popular Bach or other beautifully and dexterously. From there, the acts just went downhill. There was a guitarist and a guy that sang karaoke, and a lot of bad dancing. Rowan Atkinson fellow did another awkwardly unfunny rendition, and the crowd screamed for more of his near-nudity instead. One guy just kind of bounced around without much aim; he probably had a few too many to drink at that point. The upside to that is that one of the anatomy professors had also had a few too many, and the contestant actually got the judge up bouncing around drunkenly on stage with him.

The drunk professor is the one on the right. I think this picture is a good indication of the quality of some of the talent acts.

Our guys were the last to go. The first one, obviously smashed, called up a girl to the stage and gave her a little dance. Having set the standard of bribing the judges, they were very displeased when he didn't return with a second round of beer, and his score suffered accordingly.

When it was time for the second of our representatives, no one had high expectations for a grand finale. Amazingly, he surprised us. There was some set up involved: a table, bottles, some other stuff. Then he comes out in his sad clown costume, and actually does some fancy slight-of-hand. He did some juggling, and a lot of tricks with open bottles and fluid-filled cups. He handled them deftly, filling cups, transferring liquid, and taking plenty of drinks in between. He set a few things on fire and juggled those around too.

Then--then it was time for the final judging. Time to pick a Mr. Vet! Also, the two woman judges were in charge of selecting the second place "Hot Damn."

The winner of Mr. Vet 2011 was tight-pants gay-joke guy (5th year), who was also my personal favorite (I know I don't have a specific picture of him, but there are enough other pictures). The Hot Damn was none other than Rowan Atkinson guy (3rd year), considering that when he had his clothes on, all the judges could hear from the crowd was, "Take it off! Take it off!"

Then, of course, it wouldn't be a vet event without random nudity and streakers at the end.

Surgery Crossword

Across

2 Most common malignant primary tumour seen in the canine spleen (16)

6 Group of antimicrobials that includes enrofloxacin & ciprofloxacin (16)

7 Deliberate, surgical fusion of a joint (11)

9 Hindlimb nerve originating from L6-S1 spinal segments (7)

10 Minimally invasive surgery using a camera to evaluate the abdominal cavity (11)

11 Attachment of the stomach to the abdominal wall to prevent GDV (10)

12 Type of passive drain, and suburb in Auckland (7)

13 The presence of lymph & triglyceride fats within the chest cavity (11)

17 Region of the forelimb that consists of the radius & ulna (12)

18 Abnormal angulation of a bone or joint laterally, away from the midline (6)

19 Group of fluids containing large molecules that remain within the vascular space. Includes plasma and hetastarch.

20 Short section of small intestine that has an antimesenteric vessel (5)

Down

1 Condition seen most often in older labradors, characterized by respiratory stridor (9, 9)

3 Section of a long bone between the physis and diaphysis (10)

4 Suture material consisting of a single strand (12)

5 Surname of the inventor of the TPLO procedure (6)

8 Tissue partition that separates the two sides of the chest (11)

14 The most proximal point of the ulna (9)

15 Chondrodystrophic breed of dog with highest incidence of Type intervertebral disc extrusion (9)

16 Paired cartilage structure within the stifle that contributes to stability, but frequently injured following cranial cruciate ligament rupture (8)

Professors: Class Should Be Over Now

Our professor for renal physiology was pretty good, except for one huge pet peeve of mine. She always, consistently, without fail, every time went over the time limit. I don't just mean two or three minutes, I'm talking five to eight minutes over.

This is of course a nuisance because we have to get to our next class, and it's especially bad if you need to run a quick errand, such as grabbing something from your locker in the vet tower or getting a drink from the student shop. What really gets me though is that I found I often fill up two sheets of paper, both sides, in the space of a lecture. In a lecture like physiology with a lot of information, I will be right at the end of my second sheet of paper when those fifty minutes are up.

What happened to me was that every single one of her lectures went over time enough that I couldn't fit all the extra info into the margins of my page. I had to either write really, really small and/or cramped, or start a new page. I hate starting a new page when all I will have is a paragraph at the top on one side. I hate it!

This flaw almost drove me mad. It happened every time.

Professors: Yeay

One of our genetics professors is remarkably boring and useless, but his accent does spice up class. Here is a collection of some of his more interesting pronunciations: (bolded my favorites)

A: yeay
Acquired: ackweid
Allergy: allegedly (maybe closer to allege-ly)
Animals: aneeMALs
Both: boat
Class three: glass tree
Consumer: conzoomer
Determine: dee-ter-MINE
Develop: double-up
Digestion: dilezhion
Domain: domayan
Epidemics: epida-mix
First: fahst
H: hech or het, depending (MHC is em-het-see or m'etsee)
Homologous: homo-log-us
Lamb: lamp
Lengthy: lendy
Liquid: lickvid
Linkage: engage
Memory: mammary
Progenitor: progen-ate-or
Questions: quotients
Recessive: recessill
Reject: rezhect
Resilience: res-eye-lee-ence
Respiratory: resprayrty
Response: resp-ow-nce
Successive: successill
Surface: suhfass
Those: dos
Those breeds: dosbrees
Through: true
Two hours: two owvus
Vaccines: vaxin
Vomiting: vomishion
Which: veech
X: yecks

If you don't understand, don't worry, he will explain you later.

CPR

SCVECCS is the Student Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Society, and they have lots of interesting seminars and workshops. Recently I went to a CPR lab.

I've taken human CPR courses before, and chances aren't bad that so have you. I remember having the fake chest and practice defibrillator. Well, this wasn't like that. It was in the wet lab, which is a room kind of like a mini-version of the anatomy lab and all sorts of stuff goes on in there. There were two groups, I was in the second, and the first group went more than an hour over time. When we finally went in, they were still trying to finish up, and the first thing I saw was a room full of vet students sticking needles and tubes into the dead sheep that were sprawled everywhere. They were dirty and bloody and the room smelled rather like blood and sheep, as you might expect. I did actually find it pretty unpleasant at first, but as soon as we started doing stuff it improved a lot, since focusing on the techniques precluded focusing on how disturbing a few of the sheep were.

There were four stations.

• The first one my group did was intubation, which is sticking a tube down the trachea so the patient can breathe. This is supposedly quite difficult in sheep, and the demonstrator took a long time trying to get it in. When it was our turn, one guy started off on that sheep, so I went over to the second sheep. It was really easy and took like a second for me and the person with me. One cool part is the scope that you stick down their throat; it not only holds down the tongue and other structures out of the way, but has a light on the end so you can see.
• Warning possibly disturbing mental image: the sheep for this one were cut along their cheeks like the Joker from the Dark Knight so we could open their mouths better, since they were in rigour mortis. You can imagine why I thought it was a little creepy at first, when one of the first things I saw upon entering the room was bloody dead Joker sheep.

• The next was putting catheters into veins. This is slightly more difficult in dead animals, as they have no blood pressure. Anyway, there are three main sites you can try (jugular, cephalic, and saphenous veins), and we stuck them all. Maybe. It was kind of hard to tell.

• The third involved drawing blood, and instead of sheep they had rubber dog heads. These things are ancient and full of holes because they've been jabbed so many times, and the tubes inside representing the veins are so leaky we couldn't actually get water out like we were supposed to. They also showed us the crash cart and cave us a little description of what was inside.

• The last station was doing actual chest compressions. There were some more dead sheep, but also an awesome stuffed dog. It was black and long-haired, had a zipper up its belly, and looked kind of like cookie monster with teeth. Unlike humans, you have the animals on their side rather than their back. On really small animals, you can even just use your thumb and fingers to squeeze their chest. Also since they're animals, you have to aim for 100-120 beats per minute, so pretty quick.

Despite all the effort and technique involved in CPR, they told us the recovery rate is 5%. That's counting patients that arrest during anaesthesia. If you only count patients that come in (say, hit by a car), it's down to 1%. Makes it seem a little futile.

Med Students Must Not Do This

As part of our class about grass, we have grass labs, of course. To be fair, we've only had a few of these, but still.

The first couple were pretty much showing us grass. We all had to hitch rides out to some farm units associated with the university and tramp around looking at the plants. Seriously, we spent two hours at a time watching the little professor hold up roots and leaves and talk into the wind. Then some person would ask a question, and he'd take it as a cue to go into depth on some study or other, then remind himself of another idea, and go off about that.

The best part is that there are two professors that are involved with the grass, and the main one was always bouncing off the second with a "What do you think?" and used that to ramble away onto even more long-winded thoughts. However, the other guy tended to disagree with the first one more often than not, and they'd have a very polite but hilariously opinionated argument while still trying to lecture us. This is of course while we are all sitting outside on a farm.

Watching the dynamic between the two professors, you'd think that this whole grass lab thing could be solved if they just got a coffee together a few times a week.

After a few labs of essentially watching grass grow, it was time to learn some pasture management techniques. For instance, deciding how much grass there actually is. We were taken to a teaching unit with a bunch of little paddocks, and he showed us a few we could use as standards. Then we went off and eyeballed each paddock, attempting to guess the amount of grass (it's measured in kilograms of dry matter per hectare, if you're wondering).

The next step was to use the two different grass measuring sticks. One is an electronic meter and when the metal tip touches the grass, the grass acts as a capacitor, so the more grass there is, the larger the capacitance. It uses that measurement to calculate how much there is. It also makes a beep every time you stick it down. The other stick is a "rising plate meter" which is like a hubcap on the bottom of a ski pole, and it measures the average height of the grass. So for two hours, we have more than a dozen paddocks swarming with vet students, all walking in straight lines and climbing over fences, stopping every step to pick the meters up and down, either beeping, or swinging around a hubcap on a ski pole.

For one of the labs, we also had to count the sheep for our calculations. I don't know if you've tried to count sheep while actually awake, but I can tell you I was glad I wasn't the one trying to do it. Someone had to get into the paddock with them and find a way to keep track of which ones they'd counted. Sheep do not appreciate you getting too close to them, and they also tend pick interesting directions to run. There were 80 sheep. Someone had fun with that one.

As it turns out, our eyeballing was way more accurate than when we actually used the equipment. So much for that.

The plate meters come in either circles or squares as you can see. I'm not sure which one is funnier.

That Was Unexpected

In a recent anatomy lab, the professor announced that we were to remove the cranial half of our dog and put it into the preserved material bin.

In other words, "Cut off the front of the dog so you only have an abdomen and hind legs, and then toss the head part out." Kind of like that magic trick with the saw and the person in a box.

I was under the impression that at the end of the year we would be able to dissect the side that we haven't touched yet, for revision for the final. Apparently that's not the case, and having a bunch of dissected tissue is just a detriment since we'll only be looking at the abdomen now. After all, even if you take pretty good care of it, you can still get drying out and damage, which is not good for anybody, especially the cadavre. At any rate, we now only have half a dog.

Things That Are Creepy to Dissect

Warning: this is more graphic than most posts, and I don't recommend reading it if you get creeped out by mental images.

That being said, here are some of the things that I found disconcerting or downright creepy, as well as a few that I was expecting to be worse than they were.

Paw Pad: In the first semester, we navigated our way through the many muscles of the body, and for a long time nothing we did was at all disturbing. I may have even been a little disappointed, because I was expecting anatomy lab to be a bit crazier (it has since met my expectations this year). Even removing the skin didn't feel very weird. It was all good and fun, until we got to the paw. I'm not sure if I can explain why it was so, but there seemed to be unanimous agreement that removing the paw pad was uncomfortable. You might be able to conjure up the same feeling if you look at the nearest furry animal, and picture their thick, callous paw pad alone on a table, cold, attached to some preserved skin.

Eyelid: If you see below, the eye was cool. What was weird was the surrounding skin that was left behind, including the eyelids and lashes. Getting the eye out was super awkward, and since we had to cut everything out, in the end we were left with the ring of skin, which like I said was weird to look at by itself, so I put it back over the socket. That was a bit creepy. Imagine looking into a dog face, with its eyelids open, and an empty socket behind them.

Tongue: Mostly because the dog is dead and preserved, I don't like touching her tongue. We didn't dissect it or anything, though it did come out attached to the larynx (the Adam's Apple area) when we were looking at that. Normally dog tongues are soft and warm and wet and sloppy, but this one was so dry and cold, and rock hard. Not comfortable to touch when you're used to dogs being not preserved.

Lips and Cheeks: In a similar vein, the lips and cheeks are also a bit weird to see and feel. Probably what made them look so unusual was the fact that we had sawed the jaw in half, so a lot of the time we had it folded back or twisted in a highly unnatural manner, showing the inside of the cheeks or twisting the lips in a way that only added to the preserved-cold-dry feel.

Sawing through the face: Sometimes when we sawed through bone, everything was dissected away, but not all the time. In order to look at the inside of the skull in the muzzle, we put the saw to the nose (which, you might notice the theme, is cold and dry and preserved feeling) and just sawed on through the face. Getting the little section of skull off wasn't very creepy except for that first part, going through the nose. Dog noses are attached by cartilage, and if you have a dog you may have noticed how their noses are very wiggly and pliable. They're still wiggly and pliable after the dog is dead.

Nasal concha: After we did that, we could see into the nasal cavity. The way it works is there's a ton of thin, flat bone (called the nasal concha) that's all curly and covered in mucous, giving it lots of surface area. The air goes over that and dust or whatever crap you're breathing gets stuck on the mucous, and the nice clean air keeps going. For some reason our lab guide told us to remove the nasal concha, I think it was so we could see some openings in the bone (like where ducts open, such as the tear ducts). Since it's so thin and brittle, one of my lab partners just took his thumb and ripped it out. And, oh man, did it make such a haunting crunching noise! It is bone, after all, just very thin bone.

Abdominal Fat: If you've ever seen an abdominal surgery, you'll have seen that there's a sheet of fat and blood vessels that covers the intestines, attached at the top like an apron, which the surgeon has to lift away. This is where fat goes on fat people, and it's called the greater omentum. In the live animal, it's quite pink and fleshy. In the preserved dogs, it's very thin, transparent, and lacy. It's a lot like lacy curtains. It's weird.

Stomach: Dogs eat a lot of gross stuff. Digested dog food is one thing, but ours had tons hair (mostly dog hair), and even worse, a bunch of chewed up bone pieces she must have been fed. The inside of her stomach was pretty full. It was grainy or sandy to the touch. It was not cool.

The things that I expected to be worse:

Ribs: As I mentioned previously, the ribs are sort of in the way if you want to look at stuff in the thorax. What we did was to snap the bones at each end, but leave the muscles and everything attached, so it made a flap we could lift up. Snapping the ribs was actually pretty fun; we used bone cutters that are basically giant wire cutters. Since it was the first bone cutting lab, they had forgotten to put out safety goggles, and I tried to convince my lab group to let me do it since I was the only one with glasses. They weren't fooled, however.

Eyes: This is the classic thing you'd expect to be unsettling, especially when you cut them up and look at the goop inside. As it turns out, I didn't find it nearly as creepy as the empty eye socket, possibly because it's complicated enough to keep you interested in what you're seeing without getting grossed out. The lens was pretty cool too, it was a hard, oval little white thing rather like a hard candy.

Heart: To allow us to see blood vessels in the cadavres, they're filled with latex (red for arteries, blue for veins), so this transforms the hearts into very solid, latex-filled lumps. In order to actually understand the interior of the heart, we were given fresh sheep hearts to handle and dissect. This involved sticking lots of fingers in the chambers, and feeling soft flesh instead of the unnaturally dry, hard preserved material. It was a very good way to see what openings were where and was probably one of the best labs we did.

Brain: As you might have gathered from some previous posts, we took the brain out of our dog. Dog brains are pretty small--I look at my dog and feel pity--and they're shaped differently from a human's, because the spinal cord goes straight out the back rather than downwards from the bottom. It was a rubbery, squishy thing, kind of like those stress balls, and I spent a good portion of the lab being the one to hold it. Later on, we used a "brain knife" to cut it into transverse sections, which is like a small ruler with a sharp edge. That was cool because we could see all the structures inside the brain, and put it back together to see how it works in 3D. Some of the brain labs felt very Young Frankenstein.

Professors: Scratchy Voice

I really liked studying the cardiovascular system last year, but the lectures were a little bit taxing on the ears.

The professor that taught us about it was this old, high-pitched little lady whose appearance and voice reminded me an awful lot of Delores Umbridge in that Harry Potter movie. Her ridiculously scratchy voice made it very difficult to concentrate on anything she was actually saying.

Something that I really didn't understand about her is why she always used human information, images, and studies. Some things, you do have to depend on studies based around human medicine, because no one ever thought to figure it out for domestic animals, but the heart is not one of those things. It's pretty central to things being alive. My guess is that she either is too lazy to look for a veterinary textbook, or she didn't get accepted to med school and is still bitter about it.

There are pictures of animal hearts in my anatomy textbook, I don't see how she could possibly have a hard time finding one. If there's a basic diagram of a person, why couldn't she put a picture of an animal to show the same thing? I just don't understand.

What was that sound?

A few weeks ago, we were in anatomy lab, looking at the skull and brain. Since we've already dissected all the muscles of the body last year, our dog is not really in one piece on her left side. The left limbs are pretty butchered and I think they're both unattached from the body. Since we were looking at the skull, we wanted her flat on her stomach, not lying on one side, and in order for her to lie flat we had to dangle her right legs off the edge of the table. Otherwise, the right legs would prop her up, but there wouldn't be left legs to do the same, and the cadavre would lean sideways.

At one point, we're foiled by some structure or other, and all five of us gather around a large poster nearby to see if we could match what we were seeing to the diagram. While our backs are turned, we hear an odd shthlap! 

We look back, and our table is curiously missing a dog. Out of the entire lab period, the cadavre decided to be unbalanced and fall off right at that moment. Fortunately, none of the faculty were nearby, or we probably would have gotten another lecture on the happy, tail-wagging dogs.

Saws and Chisels

Warning: this post could be disturbing to some.

Several times now, we've had to cut through bones in anatomy lab to get to what we want to look at. The first time was in the thorax, where we had to break off the ribs so we could look inside and see the heart and lungs and stuff. This involved using a pair of giant wire cutters ("bone cutters," sure) to snap the ribs at both ends with a loud crack. We left the muscles and everything in place, so that the thoracic wall makes a little flap that we can lift to peek into the thorax. How cute.

We only needed to go through bone one other time last semester, to see the spinal cord, and the rest of the bone sawing has been happening this semester. You see, this semester, we've spent seven weeks just looking at the head. There's a lot to see! Unfortunately a lot happens to be inside the head.

The thing that really made me want to tell a story about all this bone stuff is the noise. I already described the wire cutter bone cutters, but clearly that's not going to work very well for something like a skull. Our other options are saws and chisels.

My group likes to use the saw. It's completely barbaric feeling, but it gets the job done. The saws we have are these square things about as long as your forearm, that aren't too far off from this frightening picture I got from google:

I'm sure you know how a saw sounds. Schrrck-schrrck-schrrck-schrrck. Usually we have one person sawing and the other four trying to hold the cadavre still. Sometimes we have everything dissected away and are right down on the bone, and sometimes we're just flat out sawing through the face or some such thing. That's always a little weird feeling.

A lot of other groups like to use chisels. I know this because you can hear a dozen chisels clinking away throughout the room. If you stop to listen, it sounds just like shop class. Chink, chink, schrrck-schrrck-schrrck, chink, clunk, clink, chink!

That said, what is it we're actually doing? As much as it might sound like it, we're not just tearing the face apart. The first sawing/chiseling we had to do was so we could get a good look at the jaw, and later we carefully took out a section of the muzzle, but the best was definitely when it was time to look at the brain. Despite having giant, unwieldy saws, we needed to plan and cut very carefully. You probably noticed that skulls are round, not square, and it's definitely not a good idea to start sawing into the brain. When we finally prised off the cranium, we learned that we had to then go hack off bone around the spinal cord so we could actually cut the brain stem and get the brain out. It was a long day.

At the end of the day, as normal and reasonable as it may have been at the time, it just does not do to try and tell your non-vet friends how you sawed a dog's face in half today.