Archive for tag: Anesthesia

For our last anesthesia lab before beginning the surgery section of the course, our professors demonstrated how to perform field anesthesia on a horse.  When anesthetizing a horse (or really doing anything with a horse), there's one thing you should really keep in mind: horses are BIG.  That means they are a danger to not only the veterinary staff but to themselves.  That means they need a lot of drug to get them to sleep.  And it also means that when they go down, they can go down hard. So with that in mind, I was pretty excited and nervous to watch this demonstration.  For the reasons I just mentioned, horse anesthesia can be pretty nerve-wracking.  But this demonstration had a little extra layer to cause anxiety.  This was to be field anesthesia, meaning the procedure was literally performed in a field.  No walls, no roof, not even a fence.  Just grass and the open sky.  And fifty vet student... (Read More)

This past Wednesday morning I woke up at 8:10 am, which is unfortunate because my Anesthesia lab started at 8:00.  But let's back up a bit.  To understand the circumstances that turned a simple instance of over-sleeping into full-out, blinding panic, you need to know two things: this past week was already extremely stressful, and I love goats.  For second year students, this week was our first of three rounds (better words might include storm, blitz or barrage) of tests this semester.  Now, I've been in school for a while, so I've got the strategy down: hunkering down in the trenches, turning from one subject to the next, taking enough breaks to stay sane.  At the beginning, it's not so bad; you feel good.  But towards the middle (for me Tuesday night) it starts to take a turn.  The second test of the week was on Wednesday in Pathology, the study of disease and disease processes, a class that always provides p... (Read More)