Castrations at Dawn

This morning I had a wet lab that I have been looking forward to for a long time, since the first email went out looking for horses at the end of last year. I dragged myself out of bed at 6:00, somehow managed to get dressed and find my stethoscope, and headed out to the vet med ranch. When I pulled up the driveway the sun was just starting to come up, but our first horses were already waiting in the chute by the barn. Today was castration day.

I'm not going to go into all the dirty details, in case some people are like my husband, who started to feel physically sick while trying to listen to me talk about it. But we did have some ranch colts and some clients colts who needed to be castrated, and we were the ones getting to do it.

The groups were broken down into one person from each year, with fourth years and DVMs and residents floating around to help. The first years were responsible for performing the physical exam on the horses before they were even allowed off the trailer. We don't need any strangles outbreaks. They did temperature, respiration, all that fun stuff, and the most important was checking to see if the colts actually had two testicles. If they didn't, we can't cut them, and there was one cryptorchid in the ranch horse bunch.

Once the physical exam was completed and the horses found to be healthy, they were moved inside the barn. Inside, it was our job as second years to place the catheter into the jugular vein, so we could give them their ketamine and knock them out for the procedure. It's always fun trying to stick a needle in a horse who hasn't been handled much, but aside from a little rearing here and there there wasn't anything too bad. We also calculated out all the doses for the different medications the horses would be receiving.

After the catheters were in we moved into another part of the room and waited for their pre-op drugs to kick in and make them look drunk, then it was time to lay them down and inject the ketamine into the catheter. From here on the third years were in charge of the actual surgery, with a vet watching everything they did. I won't go into detail on the surgery, but I think it's pretty cool to watch. And while the third years perform the surgery it was our job to monitor the anesthesia, and to get some more meds if it looked like the horse was waking up. We check the heart rate every couple of minutes, along with the palpebral response, which is done by tapping on the inner and outer corners of the eyes. Then once everything was done the horses were given some penicillin and a tetanus booster if they needed it, and the rest was just waiting for them to wake up.

This is what I mean when I say the wet labs are where you get the most experience. I've seen multiple field castrations done over my years working with equine vets, but other than drawing up medications I was never really involved in one before. I think the lab ran pretty smoothly, so I'm hoping they do it again next year. Then I can be the one holding the scalpel and really feeling like a vet. =]