Anaesthesia was both awesome and terrifying. Most of the terrifying part was due to the first day, and after that I slowly but surely gained confidence in what I was doing.
Rounds helped a lot: every day we had quite a thorough discussion on aspects of anaesthesia, and what to do when things go wrong. It made the days super long, though.
Our roster leader was an amazingly nice, friendly, smiley vet, who had unending patience for our complete inexperience in the hospital and working with real patients. We got to do lots of hands-on stuff, which is a huge change from fourth year. Probably the coolest part about the roster was that we made up our own drug protocols. She would give us the cases, and we would pick which drugs we wanted to use, at what dose, and what fluids to give, and so on. Every time, we were encouraged to use either a premed we hadn't tried before, or an induction agent we hadn't used, so we could see the differences in their effects. For instance, I tried a propofol/ketamine combination for induction, and that did not go so well: my dog twitched all during the surgery and recovery, due to the drug reaction on the muscles (we think). My roster-mate tried medetomidine for a premed, and her dog, who happened to be massive, ended up so zonked it turned into quite the ordeal to get it down to anaesthesia for induction.
We had a few really crazy cases. I did this one dog that had liver damage, so there were tons of potential anaesthetic complications. It turned out to have a local peritonitis around the bile ducts, and any time the surgeons tugged on it, the heart rate and blood pressure went through the roof. As soon as they let go, everything plummeted! This stressed everyone out. Except me, who had no clue what was going on because it was day 2, and was just diligently writing down everything they told me to into the anaesthetic record. It involved lots of fiddling with constant rate infusions of drugs; increase the dose of dopamine, now decrease it, now stop it, now increase it, now increase the fentanyl, on and on.
By the end of the week, though, I knew what I was doing. I knew how to set up all the machines, and what to do about every reading (though sometimes the answer is "get the anaesthesiologist"). The roster leader said that she would be comfortable with any of us anaesthetising her own pet, which, if sincere, is just extravagantly generous of a compliment!
Another fun thing about the roster was that we'd run into the other "teams" in the hospital. The students on surgery would be gowned up on the other side of the table. Several times, patients had to be anaesthetised for imaging, so we would march in their and handle that stuff, while our classmates on the imaging roster worked around us to take the xrays. The awkward part about that was when you're in the middle of taking your set of readings, and everyone has to keep clearing the room for the xray. Come back in, get a blood pressure while they readjust the positioning, everyone out again. It got a bit silly.
It was a full-on week, but very rewarding. The same thing that made it off the deep end overwhelming on day one is what made it so fun and exciting on day 5: responsibility.
The main thing I didn't like was the lack of contact with the patient. Well, the awake patient. I got to tap their eyelids and push their jaws up and down a thousand times, but I didn't get to see the happy little animal in the consult room. Also, a lot of the time, I had a very limited understanding of what was happening medically or surgically. So while it was a very exciting and enjoyable roster, I don't think I need to become an anaesthesiologist.
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