Weekends at work can be one of two things: incredibly boring or insanely busy. Last weekend was the busy kind. With nearly 10 horses in the hospital requiring treatments, I was on the go for 10 or 12 hours at a time. Combine that with the 100 degree desert weather and you've got a tired little technician.
I was busy all weekend monitoring our ICU cases, hanging bags for the horses who were on IV fluids and dealing with owners who didn't quite know when to go home and let us do the worrying. I got through Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The real action started on Monday.
A three week old foal came in with signs of colic. Rolling, depressed and diarrhea (P.S. If you work in the medical world you should know how to spell diarrhea). The doctors did everything they could to make the filly feel better but at 5 o'clock we got the word - set up for surgery. Officially our crew consisted of two doctors and two techs. We also had a peanut gallery in the room with us - two more doctors, a vet student and an assistant from the barn where the baby foal lives. The room is small and we were cramped but it was fun having a large, and surprisingly joyful, group on hand.
My official job during surgery is scrub tech, same as the human world. I get our equipment ready and hand instruments and supplies to the doctors. There is a technique to handing doctors sterile equipment and it was nerve wracking with the owner of the clinic sitting in on the surgery. Luckily I didn't contaminate anything!
Let me back up and explain how large animal surgery goes. The surgery takes place in a padded room with a table that moves up and down. Once the horse is knocked down (a nice term for putting the animal under anesthesia) we use a hoist to lift them up and set them down on the table. After the site is prepped, the doctors go in and start sifting through their guts. Next is time for the colon lavage. Sounds glamorous doesn't it?
The guts are laid out on a sterile table and one doctor makes a small incision in the large intestine and we run garden hoses up and down the inside, where it's definitely not sterile because of the manure. The tainted water runs down into a large bucket that we like to call "the shit bucket." One lucky person's job is to stir the bucket so the drain stays clear. We like to reserve that job for tech students who are getting surgery hours, affectionately of course. My job during this process is to run the hoses and keep the colon tray clean with sterile dump saline. It's fun except sometimes I get splashed with poop water. Once the colon is clean, the doctors push everything back inside and close the incision. FYI - this is the quick and dirty explanation of surgery. A lot of time and effort goes into this process to make sure all persons and horses are taken care of.
In the case of the foal, a small impaction was found and the doctors were able to break it up and move it out. At about 9 or 10 o'clock that night the surgery was nearing it's end when one of the doctors got paged. A mini horse was almost at the clinic. She'd been trying to deliver her foal for a couple hours and so far only the tail was visible. Like humans, butt first is the wrong way to enter the world.
I left surgery with one of the doctors - leaving the other doctor and tech to close and wake up the foal. With all of our surgery gear still on, we tackled the next emergency. I'll save the story for my next post but I'll leave you with one word: fetotomy. You can google it.
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