Imagine Imaging

I finished derm last week on a pretty calm note, moving away from allergies and atopy into the realm of ear infections (of course, brought on by allergies or atopy...) and autoimmune disorders like pemphigus. I spent most of one day trying to figure out the difference between "puppy strangles," a derm problem in dogs, and regular-type "strangles," which is an infection seen in the lymph nodes of young horses. Of course once I finally got around to figuring out puppy strangles, and that we don't really know what causes it but that it's definitely not the same infection as in horses, I discovered that the dog I was working with didn't actually even have puppy strangles. Nice. But I guess that's the educational part of being on clinics...now that I've spent all this time trying to diagnose puppy strangles, at least I should be able to recognize it if (/when?) I see it.

On Monday I started my second rotation, Imaging. This means mostly radiology (taking x-rays), but with a little bit of ultrasound, MRI, and CT thrown in for good measure. I was excited to see the differences between rotations, and how each service does things a bit differently (at least, that's what I assumed...). Again, there were 5 students on the rotation, though this time it was all third years, so I was hoping that there was someone who knew how to use UVIS (our confusing and notoriously bug-ridden computerized medical records system). We got a lot of instruction and practice interpreting radiographs (aka "x-rays," but if we call the actual images of bones and body parts that come up on film or the computer "x-rays" we get a lecture about how x-rays are actually the radiation that produces images, which are properly known as "radiographs." Phew.)--anyway, we got a lot of instruction in how to interpret these images during first and second year, but not a lot of info on how to actually produce the images. So, I was looking forward to two weeks of practicing taking radiographs of dogs and cats that came in for diagnostics.