VAMPIRE!!!

I don't think I fully realised just how deranged I would look when I made that face.

Anyway, 3 for 3 on my canine blood draws (as evidenced by the blood-filled needles in the photo). It took me 3 tries to hit the lateral saphenous, but I'm not too upset about it. I was working with Brynn and she tends to shriek and squirm when you touch her with a needle, so not being able to hit the smallest and squirmiest vein on the first try isn't grounds for a freak-out.

I did, however, hit the cephalic and jugular on my first try, and man did that ever feel good. Dr. Henson was right, this whole blood drawing thing is both cathartic and addictive. I've caught myself staring at veins on animals, people, whatever...and just thinking "I could hit that...". This is bad.

After lab, Perri, Cat and I went out to the stable and gave Dave a bath. He's so furry that it was more like bathing a giant dog, and we pulled what seemed like 50lbs of hair off of him. He was very good about the whole thing and seemed to quite enjoy the attention.

Doesn't he look pretty?

Tired

Between personal drama, midterms, pending finals, daily duties, and a mild case of the plague (ok, maybe it's just a cold), I've been pretty wiped out recently. I'm thoroughly looking forward to bit of a break once finals are done, especially since it looks like I might actually get to go home for a visit (thanks Mom!!). All I have to do is make it through:
- 1 nursing and restraint practical exam
- 1 parasitology quiz
- 1 math assignment
- 1 A&P lab practical
- 2 more daily duties shifts
- 4 written final exams

I'm actually very excited about this week because it marks my last ever A&P lab. You have no idea how heartily sick I am of those cat cadavers now (remember when I found them exciting? ugh!). It also marks the last time I will have to open my PhysioEX book (a particularly vile lab supplement). We're planning a bonfire composed of PhysioEX books once we're done finals, partly for the enjoyment factor, and partly because I think a lot of us truly believe, on some deeper level, that fire is the only way to cleanse the earth of this despicable presence. I know, I know - book burning isn't usually high up on my list of to-do items, but this time I'm all over it.

In other news, my poor little pea seedlings appear to be doomed. They were becoming dangerously rootbound in their starter trays and I finally bit the bullet and put them outside, hoping that they might have some small chance of survival. This is what they had to contend with today:

Yup, snow. They were looking decidedly wilted when I got home.

By the way, doesn't Dave look happy in the snow? He should. He'd spent the 20 minutes prior to this photo being a complete butthead and refusing to budge an inch from his chosen spot outside the barn door. Since I was the one who had led him there in an attempt to give him his daily walk, I got to stand there with him, in the snow, waiting for him to decide to go back to his stall. Gotta love Dave.

Parasite Profile: Strongylus vulgaris, Strongylus equinus, Strongylus edentatus.

I don't think I ever fully realised just how freaky parasites are until this term. I mean, yes, the idea of creepy crawly things living on and inside us and our pets squicks me out pretty badly, but I never knew just how bizarre, complicated, and down right weird these things can be. I always had this mental image of a worm-like creature living in a stomach, laying eggs to be passed in feces, and the cycle just repeating in a simple way. Granted, there are some parasites that are pretty much exactly like this (though the small or large intestine is a far more favoured place for them), but there are also parasites like the Strongylus spp. of horses. These things are relatively simple in that they only have one host, but man - if you gotta stick to one species, you might as well see all of it, right?

Strongylus spp. of horses

Common names: "blood worm" or "large strongyles"

Life cycle:

(vulgaris) The ova are passed in feces and develop on the ground before hatching and being ingested by the horse. After ingestion, the larva burrows through the wall of the gut to the arteries, sometimes reaching the kidneys by mistake. After settling in a nice cozy artery, the larva develops for 3-4 months before cutting loose to migrate back down the artery, penetrate the gut, and hang around reproducing in the large intestine. Rinse and repeat.

(equinus) The ova are passed in feces and develop on the ground before hatching and being ingested by the horse. After ingestion, the larva form nodules in the wall of the bowel, large intestine and cecum. The larva develop, migrate to the peritoneal cavity, and then to the liver. After reaching the liver, they kick around inside it for 2-4 months before migrating back to the peritoneal cavity and then the large bowel. From there they settle down to the business of making eggs. Funny thing with these guys, we don't know their exact route. We know they frequently end up in the pancreas, but nobody knows quite how they get there, or at what stage they do it.

(edentatus) This guy's migration pattern is mostly unknown, but these are the pieces that have been put together. The larvae penetrate the large intestine and the cecum and develop to the L4 stage. Apparently, sometimes they also do this in hematomas in the peritoneal cavity. After this, they migrate to the muscles of right dorsal flank, enter the liver via venous blood and migrate in the liver for 2 months. After 2 months they migrate retroperitoneally in the mesenteries until they reach the fat around the kidneys, then to the lumen of the large intestine where they penetrate and start making eggs. Sometimes they get lost, so erratic migration to testicles and chest cavity can occur.

Damage, diagnosis and treatment:

These guys don't rush through their sightseeing tour either. Vulgaris takes 200 days, equinus 265, and edentatus takes a whopping 322 days. This means that at any given time, an infected horse likely has many of all the different stages in it's body, which makes treatment a bit tricky. Eqvalan or zimectrin will treat the larva, but panacur, telmin, or benzelmin are needed for the adults, and even with all of these, full erradication isn't guarunteed. Strongid-C can be given daily to control adults and turn the horse into a worm-killing vacuum for the pasture, but the ova can be viable in the environment for up to nine years, so even that will only do so much. Really, you will never rid horses of Strongylus spp.

So the question is, aside from them being creepy, why do we care?

Well, they're mean. Strongylus spp. are the most common cause of colic in horses, and colic is one of those ugly diseases that vets don't like to hear over the phone. Add to that their tendency to block the arteries they're hanging out in, causing infarction and necrosis, the pressure they put on the artery walls (leading to aneurisms), and the anemia that can come from too many adults sucking blood, and generally we don't like them. Plus, they're not a slam dunk diagnosis either. The ova are typical strongyle ova, which means they look identical to many other types of ova under the microscope, and would have to be cultured to get a positive ID. Generally, accurate diagnosis is only made by positively identifying the worms on a necropsy, and that usually strikes most of us as being a touch too late. Usually the horses are just wormed under the assumption that they have Strongylus of one type (they probably do) and it's left at that.

So there you go. More than you ever wanted to know about the creepy crawlies of a horse! Expect more over the next few days, I have a test on equine parasitology coming up and this helps me study. I totally nailed the section on Nanophyetus salmincola on my last test!

Blerg

Daily duties this week. Pouring myself out of bed at 5am just doesn't get any easier, no matter how many times I do it, or how much sleep I've had the night before. I am just not meant to be a morning person.

I will admit though, being assigned to Dave chores in the morning takes a pretty hefty amount of the sting out of being at school for 7am. There's just something about grooming a horse as the sun rises over frost covered trees and the mist rises off the field that makes all of my problems seem so trivial. I don't even mind mucking the stall - it smells like horse and that's enough to keep me happy.

Still, just cause working with Dave is enough to make me blissful and dreamy in the morning, it doesn't mean I'm not exhausted by the time I get home. This post will be image heavy and short on words because the images take far less brain power.

Let's see.....

Ah yes, this is what I spent my birthday money on:


Surprise, huh? And yes, that stack of 3 skeins does say $3, and yes, that was for all 3. A yarn aficionado was having a garage sale in SE and Abbe and I went over and scored some pretty sweet deals.

This week was bandages in N&R lab.

That's a Robert Jones bandage, intended to stabilize a fracture til it can be more permanently fixed (surgery, splinting or cast). Yes, it is supposed to be half the size of the dog. You should see the amount of cotton that went into that thing.

We also got to watch Brynn get a stomach tube and then hear the sounds made when Dr. H flushed saline into her stomach. (Borborygamus!*)


I did my own bandage (unfortunately my camera battery died before I could take a picture) which was ugly as hell, but stayed on. Function over form, people, function over form!

And on that note, goodnight!

(* spellcheck wants to turn that into Scarborough, which I found highly amusing)

Horses, Bean Salads and Best Friends

I've spent most of my spare time over the past few days studying, and I decided to take a break today and go groom Dave. Something about the smell of horses just calms me down, and Dave is great to talk to when stressed. He listens quite nicely, leans into the curry brush, and half closes his eyes and sighs when you start on him with the dandy brush. Best of all, once you're done, he turns around and just rests his nose against your chest and breathes. It makes me feel like all really could be right with the world.
Of course, spending time with horses usually leads me to thinking about my best friend back home.

Twitters (the nickname I saddled her with when I was about 12) and I have known each other for around 15 years now. We both went to the same school (though she was a grade behind me) and our little sisters had met and become friends. On one of their play-dates, we happened to start talking and realised that not only were we both horse crazy, we were both just a little bit crazy, period. I can't remember the first time we hung out together, and I can't remember when I first started thinking of Twitters as my best friend, but I do remember how much fun we've had.

There was the treefort incident, where we painted the inside and then leaned over the wet paint to do the outside (somewhere there's a really charming picture of us coated in brown paint), and the time I fell into the giant ditch in their front yard. There were the frantic mornings when I'd wake up to see snow outside, as well as a neat row of snowballs on our fencepost, signaling her already prepared ambush. After the ambush, we would sled down the hill at the end of the street, towed by her dog, BJ. There were the endless summers of swimming at the lake, eating salmonberries and dumping each other off the converted surfboard we'd paddle like a canoe. There was the time we figured out we could see each other from our kitchen windows if the trees weren't in bloom, the light was just right, and we jumped up and down waving like crazy.

Best of all though was the horse stuff. We took a riding camp together one summer, and we are still talking about that one week as if it were yesterday. On our third day at the camp my horse tried to take a jump without my consent and I fell off. When I managed to get back on my feet, Twitters was right there. "You went into a perfect three point position before you fell!" she cried. "Really?!" I said, "Cool!!"

We spent hours creating our dream stables using her extensive collection of toy horses. We would build miniature dioramas on her front lawn while having serious discussions over the amount of necessary shade, spacing and types of feed we would use. We'd grab all the free horse magazines from the tack shop and then pore through them and call all the ads for free stuff. Free leg wrap samples, complimentary product guides, more free horse magazines. We didn't really need any of it, just as I didn't really need the hoof pick she gave me as a present one year, but that didn't mean I loved any of it less. I still have the hoof pick.

When we were teenagers, we both got a job at the local petting zoo. The owner couldn't tell us apart, not because we looked similar, but because what one knew, the other knew too. Any job or task I was capable of, so was she, and as far as staffing was concerned, we were pretty well interchangeable. We were dubbed "Weiner" and "Turkey" (though who was which varied) and often simply referred to as "Double Trouble". We transferred our horse obsession (which was sorely lacking in real, live horses to feed it) to the goats at the farm, and soon became the goat goddesses. We could name any of the 30-odd goats, name their siblings, mothers, and how old they were at a glance. When the goats were stampeded up to their barn at night and needed to be separated back into their individual family units, we were the best. Goat sorting could take 20-30 minutes for most people, but we could do it in 10. We were (and still are, I think) quite proud of this.

A few months before I moved away Twitters invited me over for lunch. She's an amazing cook, so I was excited when she said she was making something special that she wanted to teach me. It turned out to be a fantastic bean salad that even I couldn't mess up, and I've made it at least every month since I've moved. I made it today, right after I got home from grooming the horse, and all of it has made me miss her a lot.
So, Thank you Twitters! For sharing my animal obsession, for the bean salad recipe, and most of all for being my best friend.


Twitters' Bean Salad
(I've slightly adjusted the original ingredients, but that's the magic of this salad...just add what you want, leave out what you don't!)
1 can wax beans
1 can green beans
1 can chick peas
1 can baby corncobs
1 can black beans
1 can kidney beans
1 tomato, chopped
1 red onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, coarsely chopped

mayo
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
pepper
cumin (lots!)
cilantro, coarsely chopped


Chop onion and place in a small container with some balsamic vinegar. Shake well and let sit for an hour or so to take some of the bitterness out of the onion.
Drain the canned ingredients and rinse well under cool water to remove excess canning water. Pour into large bowl and stir gently. Add onion.
In a smaller bowl, mix together mayo, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, pepper and cumin. This part is to taste, and you want to have enough to cover all of the beans without making it too sloppy.
Pour the dressing into the bean mixture, stirring til entirely covered. Add tomato and cilantro. Serve.