I totally nailed a diagnosis yesterday.
Final year so far has involved a lot of struggling to remember details from the bazillions of lectures we had in the previous years, combined with the sudden need to actually apply these in a real world situation. Then you also add in all the hands on skills that you're kind of expected to know how to do, since they talked about them in lectures. You can guess how well that turns out.
One of these skills is abdominal palpation. The abdomen is this mysterious place full of soft squishy organs that seem rather indistinguishable from one another when you're trying to smoosh them between your hands. No amount of reading "palpably enlarged liver" will make you actually able to feel a liver, unfortunately. However, after most of a year of "yep, she has intestines," I finally had a patient where I made a diagnosis by feeling something. I felt a big hard mass near the front of the abdomen, and it was confirmed on xrays and ultrasound!
Another of these skills is the ability to hear a heart murmur. Anyone can figure out that a heart that sounds like a washing machine isn't normal, but anything less than that is starting to tax my vet student prowess. I spent a day with a cardiologist once, and every patient went something like me thinking, "That sounds normal," followed by him saying, "He has a murmur." Then the next day went something like me thinking, "Totally has a murmur," followed by him saying, "The heart sounds normal." And yet, I heard one all by myself yesterday. That's right, same patient!
A cat came in for losing her appetite gradually, and the two big things I found on physical exam (all by myself!) were an abdominal mass and a heart murmur. The intern, attending, radiologist, and anaesthetist all found the same things! Yay I got something right for a change. Take that, baffling world of abdomens.
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