Wrist Day

Since all my other patients have gone home, today was predominated by wrist-cat. This sweet little girl was found limping and it turns out she destroyed the ligaments in one of her wrists, probably from jumping down a big height and landing too hard on it. This is the same cat I admitted yesterday and we took more x-rays yesterday afternoon, confirming the need for surgery today.

The surgery is a salvage procedure where we fuse the carpal joints together so they don't end up becoming all degenerated and painful due to the instability from the ligaments. It was pretty much the coolest surgery I've seen. We opened up the wrist, destroyed all the cartilage with a burr, harvested bone from the shoulder and put a bone graft into the wrist, and then put on this absolutely tiny plate with even tinier screws. The idea is that the joints all heal into a big solid stretch of bone that is no longer flexible (fused into a normal standing position so she can still walk normally). There was lots of drilling and gadgets and metal implants and it was all very exciting. It was also my first time working with the really chillax surgeon. You see, there are two surgeons, one who eats students for breakfast, and one who jokes around and is very pleasant.

Unfortunately I missed afternoon rounds, because the surgery was long and started about they same time they did. This was slightly defeating because on monday, eats-students-for-breakfast gave us homework to present on thursday rounds, and all week I'd struggled to fit in my research and make notes. Turns out it didn't matter at all.

While I was waiting for the afternoon surgery, I adopted a fun patient that came in for an emergency Caesarian last night, and now had three brand new puppies. I watched over her, we did a bit of bloodwork, then I did the discharge with the client. She was a sweet little white fluffy dog, and her puppies were so tiny and silly and adorable.

In other news, we had a communications tutorial yesterday afternoon, talking about why clients leave practises and some common mistakes vets and vet students make. The lady shared some funny stories with us about students calling up the wrong client, and giving them a wonderful update about an animal that isn't theirs. She says there are mistakes every year: every year, animals get overdosed because of decimal places being in the wrong place, subcutaneous injections get given IV, forms get messed up and things don't go through. One time, a form didn't go through for an animal to get cremated, and this vet had seriously debated whether they should give the client some random ashes and pretend. They didn't actually do that, and she was very glad they admitted their mistake, because the first thing the client said was "I'm so glad you didn't try to pass off some other animal's ashes!" The vet said she was glad that conversation happened over the phone, because her face went bright red.