Week 2 Part 3- Anesthesia-thon!

After some rehab related lecture in the morning I meandered on over to the surgery prep area. My pals in oncology had a bunch of surgeries going on so I got to help out with those.

The first surgery was on a 5.4kg little female poodle-like thingy to remove a rectal mass and the sublumbar lymph nodes which had been affected by the rectal mass.  Fortunately for me, the vet student who was in charge of this patient was a little overwhelmed between this patient and her other one so I got to do a lot of the surgical prep with assistance from some great techs. She was bitty but I got the catheter in on attempt #2 then we got her induced and intubated then shaved down for surgery. I monitored anesthesia for the surgery (again, serious backup from the techs). Our patient's blood pressure was pretty low most of the time and her spO2 was really low as well.  She had some pre-existing heart issues but nothing too serious so we gave her a fluid bolus and her BP responded well...for a while.  We gave another fluid bolus a little while later then 25mls of Hetastarch which is a different kind of fluid that helps to keep fluid in the circulatory system better than the regular fluids we give during surgery. A few boluses later, her BP came up to an acceptable (but still low) level.
Then the spO2 level issue. Basically, spO2 or pulse ox is telling us how well the blood is being oxygenated (Brenda, Jessie, Janet...please keep in mind I'm explaining this to my non-medical peeps, so breathe and feel confident that I know the pulse ox definition that was drilled in to my head). So first we checked to make sure the pulse ox monitor itself was in place and reading properly...it's like that little thingamabob they put on your finger if you're in the hospital with the little red blinky light...except we usually put it on an animal's tongue. We wet the tongue a little and shifted the pulse ox but the reading was still low. We then considered that since the dog was tilted at an angle with her head down it might be causing the abdominal organs to compress the diaphragm making it more difficult for her to breathe. We manually ventilated her every few minutes to try to increase her spO2 which was mildly successful. All in all a successful anesthesia though not without its moments of excitement.
The second surgery was an exploratory neck surgery where some tissue was biopsied to determine if it was cancerous and required further surgery. This anesthesia was a little smoother.  At one point, the end tidal CO2 (ETCO2) or amount of carbon dioxide that the animal breathes out at the end of each breath. We don't want this value to get too high because too much CO2 is uber-bad. So, it was creeping up but we nipped it in the bud by manually ventilating the patient at regular intervals. Done AND DONE!
Yay! Everyone lived and I learned fun stuff and got to do even more funnerer stuff!