The Dreams of a Little Girl: Day 23 ~ Three Counties Equine Hospital

Today I had a great day at Three Counties Equine Hospital! After eating a hearty breakfast, Lyn drove me to the job site. I helped bathe a horse to make her feel better and look pretty, and then I created hot compresses using rubber gloves and water (like a water balloon) to hold on several horse's who had lumps on their necks and needed the swelling to go down. We had some really crazy weather today from sunshine, to turental down pours, to hail! But I still got to see some new stuff like a Scintigraphy (bone scan) machine. They were doing a full body bone scan and observed each joint in the horse's body. This is a long process that took 4 hours! Basically, after injecting the vascular system with radioactive fluid, they took two pictures (90 seconds each) of every joint in the horse's body. The horse needs to stand incredibly still for the entire picture otherwise they need to start all over again! After the bone scan, I helped out with Bertie who is a colic patient. We're not sure why he keeps colicing, so we passed a gastroscope down into his stomach and duodenum (small intestine) to look for ulcers. We did find some interesting white bumps in his duodenum and they let me take pictures of them because I was the only one who had a camera (that made me feel important! Haha!). We collected samples on the white bumps for biopsy. After his gastroscopy, we did a cystoscopy - I had never seen this before but it was sooo cool, like passing a catheter! We were able to visualize the bladder and the openings to the ureters! We also did a rectal palpation and collected a sample of his colon to biopsy. Hopefully we'll find out what is wrong with Bertie. He is a very sweet bay pony gelding. After work at the hospital, a driver from Hartpury picked me up and I returned to the therapy center to help the girls close down for the day. Nero is doing much better now that he spends the majority of the day outside in the pasture. He has not coliced in two weeks, and he gained 10 more kilograms this week! He now weighs 490 kilograms! Yay Nero! He still looks really skinny and could stand to put on another 50 kilos, but we're happy with his progress. Then, I was planning on going to the movies, but those plans got postponed again because my movie-mate is sick. Maybe we'll get to go over the weekend or next week. So tonight will be another relaxing night of reading and skyping, and maybe going out on the town later to enjoy some British night life.

The bone scan machine! Scintigraphy