Cedar Ridge Animal Hospital

No baby yet... sad :( 

Since I'm in the veterinary technician (vet tech) program at BYU-I, I am required to do 2 internships. The first one has to be at a clinic, is 200 hours long, and must be between your second and third semesters in the program. It was my time to get out and really learn whatever it is they're teaching me. (Not that I don't have amazing teachers, but the program is new and how much can you really learn in a classroom?) So I looked around at the different clinics in Rexburg and the surrounding areas thinking that I wanted to work at a clinic that offered services to both large and small animals, which is commonly called a mixed practice. I like horses and am surprised with my ability in handling them... there seems to be quite the size difference... And I like cows, I grew up with them and never was afraid of them. Being pregnant kinda changed my mind about that. The really cool thing about BYU-I is their amazing livestock and agriculture programs. The school owns about 50 horses, a whole bunch of sheep and cows and people from the area bring their sick animals in to the school for a discounted rate since they wouldn't have taken the animal to a clinic otherwise. So we see a lot of stuff. Probably 2 weeks before the spring semester ended I still didn't have an internship and I was supposed to start it in 4 weeks.... So I went to class that day, like any other, and found out we were going to be working with cattle. Cool! I don't know a lot about the medicinal things that go along with them and I was genuinely excited. We, each of the 15 students in the lab, were able to use a Frick Speculum. A Frick Speculum is a hollow metal tube about 20 inches long and 1.5 inches in diameter. We put this in the cow's mouth and partially into the back of the throat so we can administer pills or pass a tube through to the rumen (stomach) without the cow chewing the tube off and eating it. This was pretty crazy.

 We also did venopunctures from the jugular and gave thorough physical exams. The most important part of a physical exam on a ruminant animal is inspecting the rumen. Cows eat, that's about all they do and that's the most important part of what makes them so important. So if you don't look at the rumen, you can't really tell how well the animal is doing. There's a couple ways to do this: 1. watch the abdomen move. The rumen makes kind of a churning motion, like a washer machine, and it's important to make sure this is being done. 2. look at the animal from the rear and tell her shape. Is she a pear, an apple, or a papple? They should look like a pear. 3. administer rectal exam. This is why I no longer want to work with large animals. If you get a sick cow in, you give a physical exam and 9.9 times out of 10 you give a rectal exam. Awesome. And everyone in our class had to do it. They made it "safe." The cow was in a chute and there was no possible way for it to kick or squash you at all. And you wore a glove.... I mean a full arm sleeve that had a glove attached on the end. I probably could have put my head and my whole other arm in there too! So you put this glove on, you put some lubricant on your hand, and you stick your hand (& ENTIRE ARM) inside the cows rectum. Yay. It's just as gross as it sounds and they are alive and can move everything in there that you can imagine and they DO NOT appreciate what you are doing to them, I mean for them. So I decided to do an internship at a small animal clinic.

I went to Cedar Ridge almost the next day, gave them a copy of my resume, talked to the vet personally, got a tour of the clinic and agreed to start on August first. Yep, it was that simple. I was super nervous I wasn't going to be able to find one in the area and that I'd have to drive a good 40 minutes just to get to the next biggest town where there were more options. The doctor I work for is Dr. Reed Hanson. He is a very nice guy. He went to vet school in WA and has an awesome sense of humor. There were 5 other girls that worked there when I started, now there's only 4. Jalene works the front desk and helps minimally in the back, she's the designated receptionist and bill collector and likes it there. Britni is the head tech. She's been there for 6 years and knows everything about that place. She actually grew up with Michael and her dad coached his baseball team when he was little. Crazy! Jaylean is the groomer. She is probably my favorite. She's laid back, but keeps a tight schedule and is booked a month in advance because she's so awesome. I really like how she handles the animals that come in and she does a great job of not traumatizing them, but trains them to do well with the grooming process. Briana is an assistant in the clinic and she helps out with grooming alot in the summer. She's my age and is going to school too, so that's pretty cool. She lets everybody know what she's thinking and even though she looks like she's 12 she doesn't get pushed around. The fifth person's name is Amanda, ironic right? 2 B's, 2 Jaylenes, and now 2 Amandas??? I fit right in! Amanda was a tech and had been there for 2 years or so and it just didn't work out anymore. Sad to say, but I'm ok with that. It worked perfectly for me. She got fired and I got hired to take her place! Dr Hanson had planned on hiring me to help with grooming anyway and would probably have let Amanda stay until after I came back from maternity leave, but she pushed it too far and I got hired as an assistant right away.

Ok the difference in technicians, technologists, and assistants. So many terms! An assistant is someone who works at the clinic helping the vet with whatever he needs. A technician is an assistant with an associates degree and is licensed/ certified with the state. A technologist is an assistant with a bachelors degree and is licensed/ certified with the state. So I'm an assistant for now and when I graduated, pass my NVTE and keep up my continuing education credits, I'll be a technician. 

My internship was awesome. Cedar Ridge offers boarding, grooming, and all the medical services of a clinic. So we see a lot of animals whether they are actually sick, there for an appointment or surgery, or not. Grooming brings in about 6-10 animals a day, depending on if Jaylean has help bathing dogs. Boarding brings in about 5-15 dogs and 1-3 cats a week. Techs are in charge of keeping all the kennels that we keep the boarding animals in clean. This can be quite the task some days. It gets done first thing in the morning and right before you leave at 5. All the animals get fed and watered twice daily, unless the owners request otherwise. They also get let outside for playtime twice a day. Sometimes we let them out more if we're not slow during the day, but it doesn't always happen. Big dogs can only play with big dogs and the same for small ones. And you have to pay attention to who is spayed or neutered and who isn't and keep the ones not fixed away from everyone else. Just in case. When a dog goes home, you have to clean the kennel, or is it's really dirty you move the dog and clean the dirty kennel. There's a hose and a bucket of bleach/ dawn water and a giant scrub brush. It's kinda intense. But I've never appreciated the smell of bleach more than after a night of a bunch of dogs crapping in their kennels. It's the simple things really.

More excitingly, I get to do tech stuff. So I draw blood, we use the cephalic and jugular veins most often. I place IV catheters, give fluids under the skin, give dental cleanings, give lots and lots of shots under the skin and in the muscle, make microscope slides of blood or ear cleaning samples or tissue samples, keep track of inventory, shave and scrub animals for surgery, assist in surgery, intubate dogs, position animals for X-rays, give oral medications, clean ears, and other stuff too. 

Cute doggie!

Some cool stuff I've seen: 

-A cat came in with acne on it's chin. No joke, pimples, and we popped them, just like pimples. 

-Orthopedic surgery. Hook got stomped by a cow and broke his femur into 3 pieces. We put a pin through the middle and parallel with his femur to hold those 2 ends together. We took some wire and wired the other piece to rest of the femur like a puzzle piece and secured it with 2 more pins that went perpendicular to the first. Intense, difficult, time consuming, and happened on my first day there. I love my job.

-A beagle had puppies, so the owners brought the 5 puppies in to remove the dewclaws, which we recommend to be done within the first 72 hours of life. It's just easier and way more humane. The owner brought the mom in as well because she just seemed like she was still in labor. This is 2 days after the fact. We took an X-ray and found 2 more puppies! One of the puppies was folded in half and had already died by the time we took it out and the other had a clef palate and we put him to sleep. But now the mom is gonna live! 

-Just the other day I did a dental cleaning on a dog, I think a Chihuahua mix. I took the cleaner and the second I touched this tooth, it fell to pieces! It was way gross. Pus came out and blood and it smelled. So I pulled the rest of the tooth out. Gross.

-We did an exploratory surgery on a Golden Retriever to find out what a lump on the abdomen was. To our surprise, we found roughly 2 feet of completely hardened intestine. They're supposed to feel slippery and soft like jello. This felt like a rock. And it was all cancer.

-Cystocentesis. This is where you stick a needle from outside the abdomen into the bladder to remove and collect urine. This is pretty cool. And kinda crazy. Most animals would have to be sedated for you to be able to do this, but this guy was so sick he just let us do whatever. 

And there's been lots of other stuff that's been cool, but I'm sure seeing it is much better than having me describe it. All in all, I absolutely love what I do. In fact, I even contemplated not finishing school and just working at this clinic as long as I could. But since I don't want to live in Rexburg for any longer than I absolutely have to, having a license would look really good on a resume and the only way to get that is through school. Plus somebody said something about how important it is to get an education and I like most of my classmates. So I'm gonna finish school. And get paid more after that. And I'm going to continue working at Cedar Ridge for as long as we live here. I'm taking 4 weeks off for maternity leave and I'll be taking classes so that I can still work most days at the clinic during school. So if anybody wants to be a full time nanny from January to July and maybe even after that.... you just let me know!

ps. Just thought I'd throw some color into this post. I think the pictures I added make it a little more interesting.