Heatstroke! Oh, and blood.

Well, so last week was pretty toasty. It wasn't too terrible, no more than 80 I think, but inside the hospital it got warm. When I came in at 3 to work, there was a bulldog who was making this horrible snorty sound. It was his breathing, but it was like a snore, and was driving everyone crazy. Right away I helped to shave the fur on parts of him, because he had some skin issues. He was such a sweetie, though! Very lovable and enjoyed treats, and didn't mind the shaving even though it looked like it would hurt. Around 5:30, a nurse was suspicious and took his temperature, since he was still snorting so much. It was on the high end of normal, 102.3 degrees. Around 6:30, he was still making the noise, and the other PNA remarked something that he was still making that noise, and that it was weird because he hadn't done that the entire day. I was like, "wait, he didn't do that before I came?" The PNA said that he had been calm and quiet earlier. So I grabbed a thermometer and got him to help me, and we took the temperature of the bulldog again. Now, it had raised significantly... 105.0! Yikes! I told the doctor in charge of him, and she was very surprised that it had risen so much in just one hour. We right away put rubbing alcohol onto his paw pads and his belly, because when alcohol evaporates (which it does more quickly than water does), it cools the body. Then, we let him lay on some towel-covered ice packs. He was still panting a lot, and drank the water we offered him with glee. I don't know why he didn't have water before. I certainly should have checked that earlier. Anyways, it was exciting because we managed to get his temperature back in the 101 area in just another hour, in time to go home. The Pet Nurse Assistants saved the day! The doctors said that this was like early heatstroke. The kennels have good ventilation usually, but in this case he needed to be out and lying on the cold linoleum floor in order to get cool. All the while, he was a very happy dog, slobbering all over the place. Thank goodness he recovered so quickly!


Blood. OH... and I am starting to do even more of the nurse chores! I want to learn as much as I can before I go off to college in the fall, to vet school, because then I won't be working at a Pet Hospital, obviously. So, the main lab nurses and PNAs have been teaching me what everything looks like under the microscope. That's really the only part of lab that I don't know yet. I've looked at fecals, urines, and blood smears. Fecals are easiest, and urines are hardest. Urine has all sorts of junk that no one really knows what it is, like pollen and such, so it's really hard to identify what is actually important... plus, it's all small and looks the same. Blood is interesting, because mainly you look for the quality of the RBCs, and amount of platelets and how they're arranged. Platelets are little faint purple dots. When they're clumped, it's a larger groupie of faint purple dots. Then, there are 4 main types of WBCs-- lymphocytes (mostly a dark purple nucleus, little bit of light purple cytoplasm), neutrophils (segments of purple nucleus within the clear background cytoplasm), eosinophil (like neutrophils but have litle pink granules in the cytoplasm), and monocytes (like lymphocytes, but more C-shaped with a bluish cytoplasm). It's hard to tell the difference between some of them. Crenated means degraded, and it's a normal thing that happens to RBCs when you leave the blood out too long before staining the smear.
To do manual platelet count: Count the platelets in 5 high-power fields, and multiply that number by 4. It should be a total of 200-500 for normal, so an average o f 10-20 platelets per field. Of course, clumps of platelets will throw the number off.
Draw! I drew blood for the first time! It was great! It was from the jugular of a labrador, so it was pretty large and easy. One of the nurses talked me through it, and I got the blood on the first try! I stuck the needle in, and I was in the vein pretty much right away. Hooray! I'll keep trying on these big good dogs, then I'll go on to harder things. Exciting!