Diary of a Fourth-Year Vet Student: Absurd

So we are standing around a stall, looking at a horse we performed surgery on two days earlier. He had dozens of stones in his bladder that we removed. There are several procedures that can be used on horses to remove these kinds of stones, and none of them are all that great. The surgeon presented these options to the horse's owner and she opted for a perineal urethrotomy. In short, we got into his urethra via an incision that we made just below his anus.

Back to the five of us standing around the stall. The burning question was, how do we know which hole the horse was peeing from? There was indirect evidence that he was urinating (areas of wet bedding) but that wasn't sufficient. The surgeon was not willing to clear this horse to go home until we were sure he was peeing from his penis, not the hole we made in his urethra way upstream.

Even though the student had asked that techs look in on the horse every hour since the day before, nobody had actually seen the horse pee. Our discussion was lively but we had no solution to our problem.

Until the horse suddenly started peeing right in front of us! From his penis!

We (four men, one woman, three different countries of origin, mostly areligious) exclaimed as one "Praise Jesus!" Then we collapsed in a heap of laughter.

You know you are in fourth-year vet med clinical rotations when....the absurd becomes normal.

Here is a picture of all the food I made this afternoon. No matter how tired you are, if you come home from the hospital and sleep, you are wasting precious minutes and seconds. You need to prep meals for days in advance whenever you have a chance. And have plenty of pocket-friendly snacks on hand because you might not have the five minutes you need to heat up then eat that nice food during the 14 hours you are in the hospital every day.