I have mentioned before that I'm not the biggest fan of horses. I am so not a fan of horses, in fact, that I've spent the entire year dreading the two weeks of equine. You hear more gossip about it every few weeks, about students who had to do hourly checks all night and then were not allowed to go home the next morning. People who brought sleeping bags and camped out in the equine barn, or who got stuck with the 2-4am shift on a colicking horse. It's not just the dreaded "on call," it's the fact that it's also freaking horses. They can kill you, you know. They have killed vet students.
I arrived nice and early on the first day of equine, at the brand new equine barn up on the hill--it was only completed a few months ago and I'd never, ever been up there. I had no idea how to get in since the door was locked and not a single person was around, but fortunately my roster-mate showed up and we found a side door. Eventually, everyone else showed up, but it didn't really breathe life into the place. We got given a tour of the barn: a cold, high-ceilinged, mostly gray building (inside and out) with a lot of empty space.
After the tour we had rounds, where the previous weeks' students handed the cases over and the clinicians told us what new cases would be coming in. There were two that day, one of which was a horse coming in for laryngeal tie-back surgery.
The thoughts that went through my head went something like this: The larynx is interesting. Dogs get laryngeal paralysis, too, and it's also treated by laryngeal tie-back. If I wait, I may end up with a really unpleasant case, like a lameness. I should jump on it now since I'm kind of interested in it.
That's how I ended up volunteering to be the primary student on what turned out to be the most involved case of equine roster.
The horse was actually coming in for a second surgery, as the first one had failed. This one was going to be similar with a few tweaks to hopefully give it a better chance of success. Long story short, the second surgery failed, too. Very bad news for the owner, who was training this horse to be a racehorse. I had to learn all about the first surgery, the complications and chances of failure, the second surgery and it's complications and chances of failure, and the options--which included a third surgery, and it's complications and chances of failure. I had the pleasure of getting grilled about these things at every morning and evening rounds for an entire week.
It didn't help that the horse was a nightmare half the time. As far as horses go, I can imagine much worse, and I was at least able to get things done most of the time. However, there was a lot of head tossing and leg stomping and general uncooperativeness. She needed eye medication for a few days, and that was pretty much impossible. You would not believe how tightly they can clamp their eyelids together.
Probably the event that most showcased just how much that horse did not respect me was one time when I was trying to clean out a back hoof, and she simply would not lift it up. I pulled, I pushed, I yanked, I tried every trick in the book and had two people helping me, but she wouldn't budge. I finally gave up and switched with my more horse-inclined classmate, and two seconds later the job was done.
She finally went home after a week, without getting the third surgery. I managed to knock out a whole bunch of skills with the one case alone: physical exam, rebreathing exam, PCV/TP, faecal egg count, ophthalmic exam, general horse handling and grooming, sedation and IV injections, IV catheter placement, oral medication, intramuscular injections, scrubbing into surgery, and probably more than that. And since I had been up to my ears in research all week, I managed to write a pretty good case report on it.
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