On Sunday I’m driving off to spend two weeks on Work Experience with a mixed practice near Phillip Island (you know, where the little penguins are). That’s two weeks, in mid-winter, in a friend’s beach house, hopefully doing farm visits and calvings! I’m looking forward to it.

 However, that does mean I’ll be spending two weeks away from my computer and Internet, so I won’t be able to get on here and do all my regular things.

But Fear not! I have pre-written some posts and set them to auto-publish while I’m away (isn’t wordpress good?), and have three guest posts to keep you entertained as well.

I won’t be dropping Entrecards, and unfortunately I won’t be updating Twitter. I plan to use Twitter more when I get back, with regular “Did you Know”s about veterinary medicine. You can follow me at www.twitter.com/Ferox if Twitter is working that is. I guess my other blogs will fall idle while I’m away, but they’re not as important to me as this one.

Oh, and the calves in the above photo were at a Gelbveih stud I did some work at a few years back. They were calving in the middle of Summer, and those twin heifers were separated from their mother and we couldn’t identify her. So we skun a couple of dead newborn calves, put the skin on them like coats and fostered them with a new mum each!

Categories: Uncategorized
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As a future vet, I realise that I will be treating my own pets in the future, all the way through from vaccinations and desexing to euthanasia. There are two problems with this. One is that most pets end up hating vets, and the other is that I feel so very guilty doing anything to my animals. They even switch on the guilt when I’m trying to clip their claws!

Here’s a series of photos to try to explain what it is I feel when treating my own pets. My older cat Dipstick was having some dental work done, and I got to do it. My poor little kitty.

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Categories: Pets, Veterinary student
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 A regular reader wanted to know what animals feel under anaesthesia when they are operated on, and how the whole situation works. So I’m going ot try to explain what sorts of drugs are used, and how the whole process works.

Firstly, you can consider anaesthesia as having four stages;

1. Pre-medication
2. Induction
3. Maintenance
4. Recovery

Different drugs are used in the first three stages for different effects. Generally multiple different drugs are used together, because their desired effects complement each other and their side effects do not. There are also different ways of administering drugs: subcutaneously (under the skin), intravenously (into a vein) or gas.

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Categories: Veterinary student
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Have you ever seen the Monty Python skit in the Meaning of Life with all the machines in the operating theatre, one of which went ? Well, these are the machines that go  in a veterinary surgery. With pictures! Isn’t that nice?

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Categories: Veterinary student
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