Friday Night In Ithaca, New York

I was on call last night, still doing the anesthesia thing. A horse ended up coming in for emergency surgery and its story was really crazy and sad. Apparently, a stallion had been fighting with this horse and they literally crashed into each other. The stallion ended up in really bad shape and broke one of its limbs on impact. It was euthanized. The horse that came to the hospital had fractures in its facial bones and its eyeball had ruptured. The plan was to do a CT-scan (the photo above is an example of a horse in CT), then proceed with surgery if the surgeons thought it was possible to repair the damage. First let me just say that anesthetizing a horse is a whole other ball game! They're huge, so when one of those get drowsy from pre-medications, all 1000 lbs. of them fall to the ground, and multiple people have to help them go down as safely as possible. Lifting them from the induction room to the O.R. also involves multiple people and cranes. Just to get the horse into the CT room involved over 10 people, a crane, and me following this creature while it was being lifted around and giving it breaths of oxygen with an O2 hose while it was temporarily off the anesthesia machine. Anyway, it ended up in surgery. I was assisting the anesthesia resident and the chief of the service. It gets really draining watching all the monitors, taking readings, and tweaking the fluids and drugs for hours and hours. This horse weighed about 900 lbs., and by the end of surgery, we had given it about 14 liters of intravenous fluids! Horses are huge! The ophthalmologists did their thing and removed one of its eyes, and the equine orthopedic surgeons wired back together the bones of his face. Then recovery came along...woah. You crane lift the horse into this padded room, and you watch it recover from a TV just outside. Then when it finally wakes and tries to get up, 5 people from outside the room try to support it as it gets up by pulling on a rope. Finally around 11PM, we brought the horse back to its stall. I hope he's doing okay. But he did well during surgery. Monday it's back to the world of cats and dogs!