my first night! and day 2!!

So my first night in the room wasn’t too bad. Everyone was scared that I was going to freeze to death, when in fact it was so hot in there with the space heaters on, I had to shut one off, and ended up kicking off all the blankets during the night!! I guess it's a good thing then that my mother and aunt magically took out the blanket from my bag that I had intended to take....

Today was a little bit busier than yesterday. The barn was full with horses, so that made for a lengthy period of time spent doing T,P,R,MM,CRT, DP and GI on 7 horses, plus feed, water and pick out their stalls. The day started off with the digital xrays. That was a pretty cool thing to get to do. I then helped one of the Techs prepare and set up for the lavage. That whole process took the better part of the day. It started with an ultrasound which took forever because the mare’s organs were a little…out of place… maybe the foal inside her had something to do with it?) and then a belly tap to remove fluid. After the tap, came the lavage. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see that because after the tap, I went to the lab to get the Total protein of the fluid and got to see how the unopet works and then counted those cells. Earlier in the day, I got to take blood from the same mare. Now THAT was cool. She is a standardbred mare whose left jugular vein was not accessible, and because we had used her right jug earlier, I got to take blood from the facial crest! I was very nervous, because I had no clue what I was doing! Haha I had never seen it before, and had never been taught anything about it, but with a little coaching got 2 tubes full of blood!! The day finished up with bandaging the hock of a gelding, and giving him an IM injection. The arthrostomy patient by the way, never showed up :(