Uncomfortable

I've been on actual vacation for the last 10 days, and Radiation Vacation for 4 weeks before that. So, in lieu of having anything truly exciting that's happened recently in school that I can blog about, I thought I'd share this somewhat awkward anecdote from one of my final days on ultrasound.

We were really bored, so when an unexpected anesthetized ultrasound patient rolled past our door, we leapt up to investigate. And soon regretted it.

The patient was a young adult male hound mix, a research dog enrolled in a study of erectile dysfunction. The goal of the study was to investigate why radiation treatment of prostatic cancer in adult men invariably causes erectile dysfunction.

This was the first part of the study for this particular dog, so he had not yet had any radiation treatments and was just having a baseline prostatic, testicular, and penile ultrasound.

Which we completed.

Then injected a chemical into his penis to give him an erection.

Awkward.

Then ultrasounded him again. And called it quits.

Fortunately, it was only women in the room. Still felt like we had violated the poor anesthetized male dog, though!