Responsibility Time

Today was the first day of my first roster of fifth year. I am one of three unlucky bastards whose first roster is anaesthesia.

Now, the first roster is bound to be pretty intimidating. Despite four years of wandering around the vet tower, we haven't actually been in the hospital part more than one or two times. We basically have no idea where anything is, what anything's called, or where anything goes. We also have no clue how to use the computer system. Oh, and we have next to no practical skills.

I thought the first day might ease us into it. Boy was I wrong.

The reason I thought that was because we didn't start until 8:30, and had an hour tutorial. Sounds like a cruisy morning, right? Well, I guess that part was. The tutorial was pretty much what I expected: here's a reference list for this and that, here's how to check the cuff on your ET tubes. Okay, I got this.

Then at 9:45 (because the tutorial went over time, of course), we get given a list of patients for the day. A list which spans 3 sticky notes, and has four patients circled for us to do as soon as possible. And by that I mean, the surgeons want the 3 dentals to be ready to go by 10:30. We're told to go "work up the cases." At this point I haven't really figured out what that means.

The tech says "Today is probably going to be a little stressful, we have a lot going on today." Isn't that a great thing to hear, when you have no clue what you're doing?

We then get sent to the wards to start "working up" our patients. We manage to locate one of the three animals, get a lead on him, and then stand around looking lost in the middle of the ICU. Techs are all around us, but they're rather busy doing ICU stuff. We know we're supposed to use the computer system to look up a bunch of history stuff, but we don't even know how to log in. We're capable enough to take the vital signs and listen to the lungs, but from there, well... there was a lot of "Can you help us?"

Eventually they figured out that we were floundering on our own, and proper people stuck with us to help us out. This wasn't until after we'd already floundered around with 2 animals. The morning was a bit of a blur, a lot of "we need this dog ready right away" and "here's the blood, go run a PCV/TP." It's not that PVC/TP is a difficult thing to do, it's just that it's a bit of an obstacle when you've only done one in your life, forgotten how to do it entirely, and also have no clue where the machines are in this place.

Once the cases were worked up, the proper anaesthesia started. Somehow I didn't quite have a case all to myself. The other two students got their animals induced and into surgery, and I had the delightfully stressful job of tag-teaming them out for lunch breaks. This involved getting thrown into a surgical theatre, given a rundown of the readings, and then left on my own to monitor. A live animal. Getting a real surgery on its knee. I'm still trying to remember what all the numbers mean, let alone what to do when one goes bad.

Fortunately they were super easy, and all I did was write down the numbers and Xs and Os on the chart for twenty minutes (you draw a little graph over time of the heart rate and respiratory rate and blood pressure). The stressful part was mainly in the "holy crap I'm just alone in front of all these machines, with complete responsibility for this patient."

In the afternoon, we had rounds. They're basically a tutorial, with the vet running the roster teaching us students. We went over all the classes of drugs and their side effects, all the monitoring equipment and appropriate values, and fluids. It was basically a crash course of everything we've learned about anaesthesia over the past few years, in the last 3 or so hours of the most hectic, overwhelming day of vet school.

When I finally got home, what better could have completed my day than to find out I got in trouble for writing a snarky comment on one of my exams. To be fair, even the course coordinator knows it was a stupid question.