Week two of the small animal hospital has me still on surgery, but only "first opinion" and not "referral" surgery. And all of a sudden, there's heaps of time and not much to do.
Today we did dentistry. While there are some nuances and complexities, basically dentistry is dentistry and we didn't do anything that I hadn't already done on our dead dogs a few weeks ago. It was a pleasant difference to work on a live dog, this time.
There were two dentals and four students on the roster, so we each got to do half a mouth. First you clean the tartar off, which is very rewarding because these teeth can look horrid and covered in dark brownish crap, then a few seconds later look sparkly white again. There are three ways to accomplish this: tartar removing forceps for breaking away giant chunks, hand scalers for more delicate work, and the ultrasonic scaler for the majority of the time. It uses vibrations to clean the calculus away, and sprays water at the same time--I got the dog's face, the towel underneath, and myself all completely soaked.
After cleaning the teeth, I got to extract two teeth, which was pretty quick and simple since they were already so loose. I pretty much just pulled them straight out. Then you polish the teeth to remove any microdamage to the enamel from scaling, and you're pretty much done.
Not much happened for the rest of the day. Some people still have to take care of their referral patients from last week, and the new referral surgery group is completely overwhelmed and stressed out. It took us absolutely ages to sort out who was going to do which after-hours treatments this week. But other than that, I just did some of our extra learning objectives--we have to do a presentation on thursday, a newsletter article for a client, plan a fracture repair for the "fracture game" on friday, and have a look at some online medicine scenarios. I also have a thousand emails from a discussion forum about current medical cases. Even though that sounds like a long list, there seems to be quite a bit of down time this week.
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