July 13, 2010

Spent the first night in the new apartment last night. Well, that isn’t completely true, I spent about a half an hour the night before sleeping in the bed before I had to come in to the hospital to assist with a colic surgery. From 11pm to 11:30 I slept before I met Dr Dornkamp at the hospital where we stayed till about 7:15 in the morning. I went up stairs for about 30 minutes to sleep before the appointments came in for the day at 8am. The surgery ended up being 3 medium sized stones, 2 flat ones like hockey pucks in the large colon and one round one like a baseball in the small colon. We had to open 2 spots of the colon to get them all out. The horse recovered well and is doing well so far. I went out on 2 emergencies after hours with Dr Dornkamp (Jim). The first was a choke in a 20 year old horse that we passed a tube on and shot water at until it passed through to the stomach. When this happens it looks very dramatic because you are pumping water in to the plug of feed and a lot of water and green goo in coming right back out the nose and mouth. It looks like you are going to fill the lungs with nasty ingesta but the important thing to do is to sedate them pretty heavily so that their heads are down low to the ground so gravity will take all of the over flow out of the nose and mouth. It only took a couple pumps and this one cleared without any real problems but he got a bit of a bloody nose from the tube. The other call was a mini horse who’s stifle was locking in place. It was down on the south side of town and it was neat to drive down I-15 along the giant casinos. I never go down there especially at night and it’s kinda breath taking the marvel that has been built up by humans. The lights and spectacular buildings I could stare at for hours. It reminds me of Sao Paulo and the crazy commotion that you could always just sit back and gaze at and be entertained for hours. The mini horse indeed had a patella that would lock upward due to patellar ligaments that are too lax. The best thing to do is to exercise them and strengthen those quadriceps and tighten those muscles. Other wise you could go in there and split that medial ligament to get it to scar down and shorten or if it is severe enough you can even cut that ligament completely. Cutting it has been shown to predispose the patella to fracture so you only do it as a last resort.