I wish I could tell you that my first day of referral surgery involved the emergency splenectomy of the dog with a cancerous spleen that had ruptured and was bleeding into its abdomen.
It didn't. It involved butt.
After the orientation, in which they casually mentioned that we would be in charge of doing all our own consults (full history and physical exam, alone with the client), we were assigned cases. I got no-show and butt-dog.
No-show turned out to be a relief. Since this is referral surgery, the reason we have the case at the hospital is that some vet out in practice sent it to us. I read the referral letter, and it was a horribly complicated orthopaedic case with a number of problems on x-ray and CT scan, but no consistent pain response or localising signs to indicate a specific disease. So my first consult ever (ever) was going to be a confusing mess of me having to do a complete neurological and orthopaedic assessment, to come up with a list of differentials and treatment plan, for a case that had a real life vet scratching their head. Mind you, we're still at the stage where we have to think for five minutes to remember the basic questions, like "how long has he had this problem." Understandably, I was quite happy to find out that they had not turned up. I was especially happy because if they had turned up, I would have gotten no lunch today.
My other case was butt-dog. Some poor labrador whose anal sacs have been irritated for 3 frickin' months. He wasn't responding to medical treatment, so off to surgery to have said anal sacs removed. Incidentally, they were removed by the surgeon who is well reputed to feast on students' tears, which made day 1 slightly more stressful than it needed to be. I survived mostly unscathed, after about an hour or two of him saying "Swab" and me trying to get my hand in to swab the blood before too many seconds passed and he got annoyed.
Despite a surprisingly slow morning, after surgery, the day really did feel like butt. I had to sort out all the post-op meds, including pain relief and antibiotics, and get them from the pharmacy and set up all the forms, and like a thousand other things. Only, I had to do that with minimal help. It's sensible enough, we need to be able to do that, but on day 1, picking your own drugs, dose rates, and the other hairy details is a bit overwhelming. Between trying to get people to explain what on earth to put in the forms, double check my choices, and getting sent from one nurse to another to another to answer simple questions, it took me 2 hours to do something that should have taken 10 minutes.
Actually, allow me to backtrack. After surgery, I started to figure out the meds, had all those problems, but only 15 minutes before rounds started. In the middle of scratching out and re-writing and re-scratching out my calculations, my pager (yes, pager) goes off and we get sucked away to get grilled by the head surgeon on what we learned today. I didn't get to finish my post-op duties until afterwards, and then I got reprimanded for not having the form in to the pharmacy before 5pm. Surgery ended at 4:15, rounds started at 4:30.
Well, after my 12 hour day, I have about two hours to live my life before going to bed, because I have to get up ridiculously early to get all my in-hospital patients walked, fed, and examined before morning rounds start at eight. And by "live my life" I actually mean "do the research homework for the presentation on thursday."
Just like medical school.
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