Pregnancy checks!

On Friday morning Claire and I got up just after 5 am to go to the dairy and helped Dr. Ally and some of his vet students do some pregnancy checks. We went through with them and tried to identify some of the cows, which I can see is going to take a lot of practice. We got to feel early pregnancies that were still at the floor of the pelvic and only about the size of a golf ball, some that were past a hundred days and had migrated into the abdomen. I also learned how to feel for placentoms which can also indicate a pregnancy when the fetus is too far down to feel. The way these pregnancy checks work is that we insert our hand into the cows large intestine and because of the way the reproductive tract and digestive tract line up we can feel down through the wall of the intestine to the reproductive tract. We don't go through the reproductive tract because of risk of contamination. We also got to see a diagnosis of a cow with some breathing problem. The vet students noticed that the pulse of the cow was very visible through the jugular artery when the cows neck was stretched out, which indicated a heart problem. From there they listened to her heart and discovered that there was fluid either around the heart or the lungs. Dr. Ally then explained to us two possible diagnosis. The first was hardware disease where the cow swallows a piece a metal (hardware) and it gets lodged in the reticulum causing heart problems. The second diagnosis is a type of cancer that effects the lymphatic system and is fatal to the cow. Because the cow had previous respiratory problems as well as being older, the later diagnosis was the more likely one which means the cow would be culled from the herd. Interesting right? I love being reminded of why I want to be a vet :) The rest of the day we were in Raleigh doing research in the library and walking around to see the campus a little. I love giving tours of the campus because I love the campus and when you are passionate about something it tends to rub off on people (like my soul food seasoning here ;)

Side note: We went to Toraros last night for some food and drinks and everyone was quite surprised to see me with some makeup on and nicer clothes. Occasionally I like to get dressed up and look nice and I guess that isn't really reflected usually in my personality because I tend to pay attention to other things first. At Toraros Marisa and Remy sang a duet together and then announced their marriage, which has become quite an elaborate joke between everyone, but funny none the less. After Toraros Kristen, Remy, Gabriella and myself continued the party in the kitchen of the boys house where we shared stories of our childhood especially involving our parents. Always good to reminisce and even better to hear stories from other peoples families. I guess it really makes me happy to hear people appreciate their families because it's no longer a given in our society nowadays.