Rats and rabbits and mousies, oh my!

This week's exciting(?) rotation is Rabbit & Rodent Medicine!

RRM is the first rotation of the year that I haven't been all that enthused about. I'm not entirely sure why I even got it as an elective, since I ranked it 11/23 for the fall and 15/25 for the spring. But oh well?

I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of knowing something about how to handle and treat healthy and ill rabbits and rodents. However, I've focused my elective course choices on other areas (like business) so have missed out on much of the exotic animal curriculum offered so far as electives.

Plus, I have almost zero experience working with this little critters in a clinical setting.

Today we had a tour of the lab animal facility on main campus, that took about 30 minutes after our 15 minute orientation. After that, our group of 5 juniors was set free to work on about a dozen sample cases that we'll discuss on Wednesday morning. We were done with all of that by 9:45 or so, though the rotation was scheduled to end at noon -- so, yeah, there will be plenty of free time this week.

Tomorrow is rat handling, anesthesia, surgery, and necropsy. Thursday is the same, but with rabbits instead of rats. Wednesday is the aforementioned case discussions, and our 4 hours on Friday are set aside for "case presentations" where each of us 5 students gives a 5 minute presentation on a topic of our choosing (how exactly that adds up to 4 hours, I'm not quite sure yet).

I've already learned that when rabbits get an upper respiratory infection, the lay term is "snuffles" (how CUTE!) and that you shouldn't grab a chinchilla by its fur because when chinchillas are scared, their defensive mechanism is for their fur to fall out if someone pulls on it. Other than that, I guess I can say I had plenty of time to look at apartments today!