Week One at WVS ITC Ooty Complete

The first week of our surgical training course is over and it's been an amazing experience. It's been a hectic week but everyone here is so nice, staff and participants, so it's been a pleasure.

There is an on-site chef who cooks us all three meals a day and the food is soo good!

A typical day starts with breakfast at 8am then rounds at 8:30 before we start a day of surgery.

There are 10 of us so we're split into pairs, A and B, so while A is operating, B will be maintaining and monitoring total intravenous anaesthesia. The drugs protocol is already devised for us with ten drugs as standard to include anaesthetic, analgesia (pain relief), antibiotic, anti-parasitic and finally a rabies vaccination. We are able to add to this if we feel the dogs need it during or after surgery.

Surgery tends to finish between 4:30-5 when we will have a break then a lecture 6-7 before evening rounds and dinner at 8:30.

On Monday we started with lectures and a tour of the campus, then we observed demo surgeries to go through procedures and what's expected of us.

Tuesday morning we each performed a surgery each followed by an afternoon of anaesthesia lectures. Then from Wednesday we've each done two surgeries every day.

So far I've done four dog castrates and three bitch spays which have all gone well. Of course I've made a few mistakes with suture patterns etc but I'm learning so much!

Intradermal suturing has always looked fairly easy but it's actually really tricky. I've learnt to take my time and finally got the hang of it today - the vet said he was impressed but there's always room for improvement.

Standing all day and operating has ruined my back. I'm not sure if it's because of the table height or because I'm leaning over too much but I guess it's something you have to get used to and muscles will strengthen with use and experience.

Tonight we went out for dinner in Ooty which was really nice to get out of the campus and have a drink to relax with everyone. We spent the night talking about non-vet stuff which was a welcome change!