Working on the surgery skills

Yesterday, we did another surgery. Because it was a major surgery including an exploratory surgery, liver biopsy, ovariohistorectomy, and cystotomy (bladder surgery), it was scheduled to be a terminal lab on piglets. I think I already mentioned before that a few of us students were uncomfortable with the idea of euthanizing healthy, young animals and requested an alternative. Lucky for us, we have very understand teachers and administration, and they were able to acquire a previously euthanized dog to work on instead.
Emotionally, as you can imagine, it's still sad to know that this dog was alive earlier that day and had been euthanized, but logically it made us feel a lot better knowing she wasn't killed for us. She was going to have to be euthanized anyway (she was quarantined at the animal control and had to be euthanized after a certain time period).
Although our other classmates got to do all those procedures on live animals (which allowed them to work realistically with hemostasis--control of bleeding during surgery), we still felt that our experience was incredibly educational and that we really didn't miss out on that much. We scrubbed in and maintained sterility like normal, and we performed all the same procedures as our classmates. Plus (and this is a big plus), we got to do it all on a dog, which will be our most likely patient, instead of a pig, whose anatomy is quite different.
It was a long day...I was gone 12 hours in all (the longest I've ever been away from Cyrus since he was born, I think), but it was rewarding to learn a lot while staying true to my principles. On a side note, we did miss out on the anesthesia experience by doing the alternative. No one ever thinks about it, but these surgery labs also contribute to our knowledge of anesthetizing our patients and maintaining them on anesthesic gas. To make up for that, we will be required to do an extra week of anesthesia rotation during our senior year. It's not my favorite subject, but it was definitely worth it.
We had a sophomore student observing and she took the pictures below.
-Shirin
PS. This was the one and only terminal lab we had scheduled for this semester, so the rest of our procedures will be survival surgeries, like last week. Next week we do a cat spay, and the week after we do a dog spay (the animals are woken up and returned to the shelter to get adopted). Yippee!!! After that we also have an equine cadaver leg surgery and a bandaging lab.

From left to right: Lisa, Beth, and me. Tammy and Lisa switched lab groups for just this week so Lisa could participate in the alternative.

Lisa, the main surgeon this week, made an incision from xyphoid to pubis. Since we had to examine everything from the diaphragm to bladder, the incision had to be very long.

Opening the abdomen. All that white stuff inside the skin is subcutaneous fat. You'd be surpised how thick the layer of fat is, even on a fairly trim dog. God knows how surgeons get through all of it on heavy humans!

Me exteriorizing the uterus, I think. It was pretty big, like she'd just been in heat.

A teacher giving us a 1 minute tutorial on doing an exploratory.