Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Playing "House"
The Game I Always Seem To Lose

That's what we do in referral rotation. Mainly sitting around attempting to use our brains to solve cases other vets can't solve and every afternoon a clinician comes in and quizzes all of us in turn about the 100 possible things that could cause problems like vomiting, bleeding, coughing etc in animals. And when it comes to my turn I always seem to draw a blank.

Maybe its having the post lunch "sleepytime" in my brain.

Or the coffee just hasn't kicked in yet.

Or the way I think. I normally narrow things down to a few possible causes after more information like history, clinical signs and diagnostic results, but knowing all the different posibilities also helps in a way I guess. But then again,knowing everything an animal could possibly have doesn't exactly help an animal if you can't narrow it down to what it has. You can't possibly treat 100 diseases in an animal and expect it to live.

Well, I've had 2 cases so far and they are still well and alive. It has only been 3 days though in this 2 week rotation.

I've got to do fun things like collecting urine from a dog through a needle into its bladder. And collecting blood from a cat's jugular vein.

I need to kick start my brain into working again. Stat.

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