Hello! I'm at a Continuing Education presentation right now at KSU. It's called 'Enhancing Patient Care with Nutrition'. Our speaker is Lisa Freeman from Tuft's University. I was kind of scared that the presentation was going to be confusing to me since I'm only a first year student, but actually she explains everything really wonderfully. There are some technicians here as well, so anyone who is somewhat familiar with veterinary medicine could understand what is going on. It's interesting for me since I got the chance to work at Advanced Critical Care & Internal Medicine (ACC&IM) in Tustin for a bit. I remember I made a TPN solution to give IV to a dog that was on a ventilator. I knew it was a nutritient solution, but now I kind of have an idea of why the doctor chose to give TPN and some of its implications. It's pretty interesting.
I've been kind of opposed to emergency and critical care after working at ACC&IM because I felt that a lot of the animals were in too poor condition to really be treated. I felt like we were just prolonging it's very soon to be inevitable death. I'm getting a better feel for why vets do some of the things that they do in emergency and critical care... I'm still kind of opposed to it, but now I at least understand a little better WHY. It was disheartening to see so many animals with feeding tubes of some sort.. and I always kind of associated it with the pain and suffering they were going through. But I see that it is actually not the case. I know I have a lot of learning to do, and I know that I need to be more open-minded about the way emergency and critical care functions. At least it's a start... =/
Things are more fast paced at school... now we're going to have a test every Friday and that's definitely going to keep me busy. I'm super tired, but I'm going to start studying for physiology tonight hopefully (my next test Friday).
All righty.. the conference is starting back up again.. so ciao!
