So today I just wrapped up my 2nd day at UP Diliman. For the last two weeks we were to report to the Veterinary Teaching Hospital in the University of the Philippines: Diliman in Manila for a two-part orientation. Today we wrapped it up and had some fun in the end.
Now, before I go on, I have to tell you guys that I’m feeling really under the weather right now and I’m not sure how much I will really be able to write before I crash. I really just want to hit the sack, but I feel like I want to talk about what happened today so here goes.
Today was the second day of our orientation and so I got up at 5am to get picked up for our trip to UP: Diliman. Last night I wasn’t feeling too well (I guess the change of weather from the very hot and humid outside environment and the ultra cool temperature of my air-conditioned apartment clashed and made me sick. I’ve had a runny nose all of last night and today).
Dr. Vera Matawaran who was our orientation leader had let us explore the hospital and its different parts in rotations. We were able to check out and ask questions about the Surgery Room, X-Ray Room, Laboratory (otherwise known as the Animal Disease & Diagnostic Laboratory or ADDL), Treatment Rooms, Records Room and the Pharmacy/Billing room.
The hospital is equipped with it’s own portable and non-portable x-ray machines and a dark room for the development of x-ray films. The surgery room was big and somewhat clean with drugs, scalpel blades, endotracheal tubes and operation lights for surgery. I found out that in the Laboratory lots of common hospital tests are run there including the Complete Blood Count (CBC), Differential blood cell counts as well as packed cell volume and fecalysis. The head of the records department told us that they currently have 22,000 clients on file with about 50-70 clients coming in on Friday and Saturday, which is their peak times during the week. In the pharmacy room, were were informed that clients and clinicians not only went there to request drugs, but clients were also to pay there before anything was administered.
All in all the UP: Diliman veterinary hospital was pretty cool. Towards the end though, one of the doctors, Dr. Marco F. Reyes, asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to be clinicians for the day. So my friends and I signed up and had a taste of being junior clinicians for the University of the Philippines for the very first time! It was pretty exciting and informative and being in a clinic before actual clients is a little daunting. Especially trying to get over the language barrier with me not knowing full Tagalog yet was interesting. I hope to get better as time goes on.
Me and my friend Rosebelle paired up and were assigned to a senior clinician who happens to be one of my friends, Carmel. Carmel guided us through the process of how to fill out the forms and talk to the clients and also how to prescribe and obtain drugs in the hospital. She let us examine the general appearance of the animals, obtain the temperature, test the respiratory rate and pulse and also try to examine any of the other systems in the animals seen. It was pretty cool donning my stethoscope and finally applying some of what we’ve learned in classes these past two years. This third year seems to be pretty exciting and I hope that when we come back at the end of July that we’ll have it a bit easier since we’ve been exposed to it already.
What was cool was that the clients themselves were interested on seeing the new faces and asked me a lot of questions of how the hospital worked, how long a course in veterinary medicine took and also what made me decide to attend here. In general it was quite fun to talk to the clients and luckily we didn’t run into anyone overly demanding.
I’m definitely excited to go on with our rotations for the next few weeks. I think it will be pretty fun!
It sucks because I don’t have any pictures from today, but I thought that I would still share with you how awesome today was (despite the being sick part).
So okay, that was pretty long. I think I’m going to pop some cold medicine and go to sleep. I have a surgery and physiology test this coming week and being sick is not helping at all…
But I’ll catch you guys later. Hope you’ve all been doing well. ๐
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