Vet Gazette

Mickey Cat is fourteen years old and on his seventh or eighth life.  His most recent life came courtesy of the Oncology Service at the OSU Veterinary Teaching Hospital.

Nancy Hildebrandt rescued Mickey from a shelter in California when he was six months old. “It was a wonderful place where cats roamed around in a converted house,” she recalls. “He kept sitting on my lap and pushing his nose up into my chin as if he were saying, “Take me!” At one point he climbed onto the back of another cat sitting on my lap so he could get at my chin.” How could she not take him home?

At the time, Hildebrandt lived in a remote area where she let Mickey roam free. “It could be a dangerous place, but I thought freedom was more important than keeping him indoors.” One day, Mickey did not come home so Hildebrandt went looking for him. “I found him up a tree. He had a bite on his belly from a fox or coyote.” The bite got infected and he was very sick, but Hildebrandt’s veterinarian saved him. That was life number three.

When Mickey was five, his nose started looking funny. “It would swell up and get scabs on it,” says Hildebrandt. “The vet thought it was squamous cell carcinoma. I was already saying goodbye to him.” But it turned out to be a rare case of nasal herpes. The virus will always be with him, but with treatment he has lived a normal, happy life.

Then, last year, Mickey went to Rivers Edge Veterinary Hospital for a routine dental exam. Unexpectedly, they found elevated levels of Alanine Transaminase in his liver test. “They aborted the dental and sent me to OSU,” says Hildebrandt. “A biopsy revealed lymphoma of the alimentary tract. The prognosis was a year without treatment, and two to three with.”

The OSU oncology service began treating Mickey with oral chemotherapy. “He has zero side effects. My understanding is that he’ll stay on the chemo as long as he is able to tolerate it, then that will be the end for him,” says Hildebrandt. “But we’re already past one year and he’s doing great.”

The other good news: Hildebrandt is now a volunteer on the client advocate team at the hospital. “This is such a warm and friendly place, from reception, to the students, to the vets,” she says. “I’m an introvert, so it’s sometimes hard for me to talk to other people. On the other hand, I am a really good listener and that gives me some skills in being empathetic.”

Many clients of the OSU hospital have very sick pets, so they spend a lot of hours in the waiting room. One of the goals of the client advocate team is to provide company and support for those pet owners. Because she is a client herself, Hildebrandt knows how important that is, and is able to connect with fellow clients. “A lot of them really want to talk about their pets, which makes it easy; and I spent hours sitting out in the waiting room, and had a lot of conversations before I became a client advocate, so I thought ‘This won’t be too hard’.”

Hildebrandt spends most of her week working with technology so she really looks forward to her Friday afternoons at the hospital. “The clients here are a cut above because they are willing to go the extra mile to save their pet. Many of them are also very interesting people. Volunteering gives me the opportunity to change focus and meet some great new people.”

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The College of Veterinary Medicine is offering a one-week course on the physiology, rehabilitation, and care of athletic horses November 12-15, 2017 at the Veterinary Teaching Hospital at OSU. There will be lectures, practical sessions and case studies to provide current information on equine exercise physiology, prevention and treatment of sports-related injuries, and rehabilitation and therapeutic modalities.

See schedule for specific topics, details and times.

OSU Speakers

• Jacob Mecham, DVM, CVA, CVSMT. Head of the OSU Mobile Equine Service, Dr. Mecham is certified in veterinary acupuncture and spinal manipulation.
• Erica McKenzie BVMS, PhD. DACVIM, DACVSMR. Specialist in large animal medicine and sports medicine, with expertise in exercise physiology, muscle disease, and nutrition.
• Stacy Semevolos DVM, MS, DACVS, DACVSMR. Specialist in large animal surgery and sports medicine, with expertise in orthopedic issues in horses.
• Katja Zellmer Dr.med.vet., MS, PhD. DACVS, DACVSMR, CERP. Specialist in large animal surgery and sports medicine, rehabilitation trained, with expertise in orthopedic issues in horses.
• Dr. Stacy Cooley DVM, DACVR. Specialist in multiple imaging modalities including ultrasound, CT and MRI.

 Special Guest Speakers

• Carol Gillis DVM, PhD. DACVSMR. Specialist in large animal surgery and sports medicine, Dr. Gillis is a nationally recognized expert in ultrasound and rehabilitation. She is holding a special practitioner-only workshop on Sunday November 12^th.
• Dr. Joann Slack MS, DVM, BS. DACVIM. Service Chief of Cardiology and Ultrasound at University of Pennsylvania, New Bolton Center. Dr. Slack provides high level expertize in equine cardiology. She is holding a practitioner only workshop on Friday, November 17^th.
• Dr. Chris Wickliffe DVM. Owner of Cascadia Equine Veterinary Clinic and a trained farrier, with expertise in sport horse podiatry.

Registration

Deadline for registration is November 8, 2017. Practical sessions have limited participation so register early!

For the tenth year in a row, a team of OSU veterinary students, veterinary technicians, and veterinarians have set up a free clinic on the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua. The communities there rely on OSU to bring much-needed care to their livestock and pets, many of whom are diseased and suffering from malnutrition.

The Ometepe trip is sponsored by the OSU International Veterinary Student Association, so Co-Presidents Andrew Schlueter and Kristen Wineinger spent their summer fundraising and tackling the big job of organizing and transporting dozens of volunteers, and hundreds of pounds of supplies, to a third-world county on an island in the middle of a lake.

For Schlueter, the most challenging part was deciding what to take. “After doing inventory of donated supplies, I had to figure out what else we needed for six days of clinics, knowing I had limited space,” he says. “And I wasn’t exactly sure what was in storage down there, so it was a bit of guess-work and just hoping we didn’t run out.”

All the gear and people arrived without incident and then the team began the physical labor of setting up an efficient ‘hospital’ with stations for intake, exams, diagnostics, surgery, and recovery. The stations consists of folding tables and picnic tables on a cement floor in an old industrial building that is open on three sides. They also set up an area for public health education. Then people from all over the island start lining up with their animals. “Many of the people attending the clinic have walked two or three hours,” says Schlueter. “They are prepared to spend all day waiting for us to see their animals.”

Students who volunteer for the Nicaragua service trip get a leg up on their future veterinary career. They see diseases that aren’t common in the U.S. but which could occur in future patients; they get early, intensive participation in surgery; and they get to practice diagnostic skills they have only read about in books. “It is good preparation for becoming a vet,” says Schlueter. “We do so much while we are there. If you are on Wellness you will do 20 blood draws in a day. You get to do fine-needle aspirates, and a lot of things you would not do until you are a fourth-year vet student, or even an actual vet. They just throw you right in there.”

On his first day Schlueter was stationed in wellness where he did exams, drew blood, ordered diagnostic tests, and decided where the patients went next. “On the first day we saw a rabbit whose owner had paid a vet $20 to remove a mass on its jaw. They wanted make sure it was healing okay. It wasn’t; it had an infection, so we gave it antibiotics.” The family must have really loved that rabbit, because in Nicaragua, $20 would buy three rabbits to raise as food animals.

Everyone on Ometepe learns to be resourceful. The diagnostic station uses donated microscopes and the one with the highest magnification quit working. This prevented them from doing platelet counts. “One of the criteria for sending an animal to surgery, even just a spay or neuter, is to get a good count to make sure their blood will clot,” says Schlueter. “The working microscopes could only go to 40x, so we switched to another method. We used little tools to cut the inside of their gums, then timed how long it took them to stop bleeding.”

The OSU team treated 646 animals including dogs, cats, goats, pigs, horses, a chicken and a parrot. They even dewormed a tame squirrel.

Several veterinarians volunteered for the trip including Dr. Dan Lewer from Willamette Veterinary Hospital, Dr. Elizabeth York, a large animal surgeon from Tuskegee University, and Dr. Nicky Poole, a mixed animal practitioner from Virginia. Dr. Hernan Montilla, a Florida veterinarian, has been a long-time participant in the Ometepe clinics. Dr. Breeana Beechler, OSU faculty, worked on the public health part of the clinic (see related story in Animal Connection).

For Schlueter, the most rewarding part of the trip was seeing his classmates enjoy the experience. “It was the first time many of them had been involved in a surgery, and after they had done a spay or a neuter,” he says. “It was great seeing how much they learned and how happy they were about it.”

Alex Rowell with his rescue dog Winston.

Dear class of 2021,

I want to be the first of many people to welcome you to this new and thrilling journey that you are about to partake on. All of your hard work as an undergraduate student has paid off and as you begin on a new voyage, I want you to reflect upon a couple of important things that are vital to your overall well-being.

1. Love- You have joined this noble profession for the love you have for animals. Whether you grew up on a farm and can name all your favorite, horses, chickens, and/or cows or you came from a large city and have a strong attachment to your first cat or dog. The love and passion you have for animals has been reward by the fact you have been given this wonderful opportunity here at OSU. To be a healer and a caretaker bares a great responsibility to not only your patients, but to the clients who you serve.
2. Drive- There is no secret on how hard it is to get into a veterinary medicine program. For the very seat you occupy, there are hundreds maybe thousands of students who wish they could be in your shoes. I am not reminding you of this fact so you feel bad, but I want you to acknowledge how brilliant, hardworking, motivated, disciplined, and self-sacrificing you are! No, I am serious please take a minute to reflect on this……………………… go ahead……………………………….I can wait…………………………………………..There is a reason why I bring this up, there will be times when you are sitting in your first year class and you begin to question your own intelligence and then start to feel like you do not deserve to be here, but I will let you in on a little secret, there is no one more deserving to be here at OSU’s veterinary medicine program than you! Please NEVER forget that.
3. Compassion- I am not talking about just having compassion for your patients and clients, I am talking about having compassion for yourself and your classmates. There will be times where that little voice inside of you will come up and whisper in your ear “try harder” or “why are you not as good as so and so” or “you are so dumb; how did you not know that.” These self-defeating statements and beliefs plague the veterinary profession and at what cost? Dr. Kristin Neff has three important elements of self-compassion to live by: self-compassion over self-judgment, common humanity over isolation, mindfulness over identification. If you remember to be warm, reflective and understanding towards yourself instead of doubting your own abilities, you will be a better learner. If you remember that you and your classmates are not alone and there are hundreds of people here to help you or one of your classmates, you will never have to feel you are the only one suffering. If you just sit with your current success and failures instead of ignoring them or suppressing them, you will be able to experience both the highs and lows of what these next four years have to offer.

I want to welcome the class of 2021 to Oregon State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Never forget the love you have for this profession, the drive that keeps you going after 8 to 10 hours of studying and the compassion you have for your patients and yourself. Stay voraciously hungry and you will find that the next time you put on a white coat, you will have a DVM after it.

Sincerely,

Dr. Alex Rowell

CVM Wellness Coordinator and staff therapist

After many meetings between architects and stakeholders, the first concept drawings of the Magruder Expansion are done.

Interior room sizes and details are still being fine-tuned, but the location and size of building additions has been decided and includes a new lecture hall, more space for the small animal hospital, faculty offices, and a space for the oncology service to house a linear accelerator. The Linac will allow the hospital to offer radiation oncology to their patients, and allow students to get first-hand knowledge of the field.