Scrubs, Stethoscopes, and Scalpels- The Life of a Vet Student: Up Close and Personal with the GI Tract

I think my last anatomy lab was one of the more interesting ones, at least for parts of it. This time the themes was gastrointestinal tracts. The lab was split into three parts- equine, large animal and small animal, and then each of those sections was split up as well. So for the equine rotation we got to observe endoscopy and ultrasound, which was really cool. Now I fully admit I am no good at reading an ultrasound yet. I couldn’t do it for therio when trying to find follicles on the ovaries, and if I hadn’t been told what I was looking at I wouldn’t have been able to tell you if I was looking at spleen, intestine, or artifact. But it’s clinical application, and I love learning that. Since I’m hoping to become an equine practitioner I’m going to have to learn someday, so I might as well start now, right? We traced over the entire gastrointestinal tract, starting at the edge between the thorax and abdomen, where we could see some lung too, over the stomach, spleen, liver, intestines, kidneys, cecum, and colon. I won’t promise this, but I feel slightly confident now that if I saw an ultrasound I could at least tell you the difference between the spleen and the liver on an ultrasound. Especially if I knew which side of the body the image was from. Ultrasound is such a useful diagnostic technique, but I think they need an entire class on how to read it. No more radiographs, I’ve had enough of them. We need some more ultrasonography.

Then we got to watch one of the vets scope a horse, and he did get the endoscope all the way into the stomach. I am a little worried about being able to perform endoscopy myself, since apparently if you play a lot of video games you’ll be really good at it. I do not play a lot of video games, and I definitely wasn’t picking up on the whole everything is reversed aspect of it very quickly. But I’ve only ever seen inside the stomach of a dead horse, and that’s a lot different, so it was really interesting. And we some some bot flies in the horse we scoped. I did feel bad for the horse though. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s not really fun having a tube shoved up your nose and down your esophagus all afternoon.

The final equine station was about putting a stomach tube down a horse’s esophagus. This is important because when a horse has colic one of the things you might do is give it some mineral oil to try and break up whatever obstruction is causing it. So we did give a horse about 2 gallons of mineral oil and then refluxed it all back up. This part was mostly learning about positioning, how to make sure you’re in the esophagus and not the trachea, and then we all gathered around to listen for gut sounds. My favorite part of the lab, for obvious reasons. I feel like I’ve been horse deprived while in school, so I always love being able to just be around them, even if it is during lab. At least vet school is probably the only place you can get away with not paying attention to the teacher so you can pet an animal and you won’t get in trouble for it.

Next was the large animal section, aka cows. I am not a cow person. They’re cute when they’re little, then they’re just big. They have pretty eyes, but that’s about it. But in this lab we did pretty much the same things- we ultrasounded the GI tract and put in a stomach tube, and we also got a little lecture on teeth. You might not know it, but cows only have teeth on the bottom of their mouth. On the top they have what’s called a dental pad. Just a little fun fact.

The best part of the cow lab was getting to stick my hand into Rupert, the school’s fistulated cow. Rupert essentially has a plug in his side that goes straight into his rumen, so you can’t stick your arm in and get all up in the hay inside his stomach. And you can really smell the fermentation. And don’t worry, it doesn’t bother him at all, he’s happy as can be. So we all got to have a feel around his rumen and then we all took a look at a slide that had rumen microbes on it. And those little bugs were zooming around all over the place like my husband after multiple Monsters, or my Sydney going after a roach. I could have watched them for a while, they were very entertaining.

The small animal section was not as much fun, so I’m not going to talk about it much. We did get to look at some pictures from various endoscope procedures in dogs, and we did a “physical exam” on two dogs, meaning we pet them and tried to look busy. This can be a good lab, but it’s on a Friday afternoon, and by the end of the week if you stick a dog in my lap I’m a lot more likely to scratch it’s ears than palpate it’s lymph nodes. But over all, I’d say it was a pretty good lab.

Passing mineral oil down a nasogastric tube

Me and Jenn

Listening to gut sounds

A brave classmate inserting the hallow tube that we pass the stomach tube through, which prevents the cow from being able to bite down on and destroy the actual stomach tube