If it walks like a seal....

Today has been day 3 of my orthopedic rotation and I am exhausted. Normally it is one senior clinician a week that sees appointments Mondays and Wednesday and does surgeries on Tuesdays and Thursday. Somehow my rotation got lucky and got dual services all three weeks. This means there are two senior clinicians on and we are seeing appointments Monday through Thursday and are doing surgeries Tuesday through Friday. On top of all that, one of the clinicians on this week and next week is notorious for overbooking and doing lots and lots of surgeries. Suffice to say that it has been a really long three days. 

My first two cases were both very interesting cases. One was a limping German Shepherd Dog that turned out to be a neurologic case. He had a nerve sheath tumor that has a pretty guarded prognosis. That was quite sad. My second case was a little Corgi that was walking in a palmigrade stance. Turns out the poor little thing had some sort of erosive arthritis in multiple of its joints.

Palmigrade. The front feet should not be in this position.
Now imagine this in a little Corgi and you have my patient

I have two other cases going into surgery tomorrow and on Friday. One is getting a TPLO (Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy) and other is getting a bone plate removal. More info to come next time.