Day 26

1100: Had a sick piglet this morning in one of my boxes - it looked like it had dilated cardiomyopathy with associated congestive heart failure - the heart was enlarged and thin-walled, with fluid in the chest and abdominal cavity and with a fibrinous exudate on the liver, which was enlarged and congested. It got the chief pathology lecturer excited, and he's taken the heart off for histopathology. RM reckons I'll get the results around Christmas time, and the PM room technician, R, thinks it'll be more like Christmas 2008. I think I'll be waiting a while, then.

Today was supposed to be the last day of us collecting material from the farm, but because we started so late on the first week, I'll be collecting material all next week too. I'm not complaining, because it means I get to spend lots more time in the PM room.

1745: This afternoon, a bull mastiff came in from a vet practice in Glasgow, with lymphosarcoma (often called 'Bull Mastuff disease' because this breed seems to get it quite frequently). It was a lesson in anatomy - all the lymph nodes were grossly enlarged and in some cases, visible through the skin.

To those non-vets out there reading this, the locations and names of lymph nodes are something all vet students are expected to know, but because the nodes are usually small they're hard to find, and sometimes even hard to see when pointed out. So to see them through the skin was something very unusual, and all those nodes I'd heard about but never actually seen were suddenly there. And visible. Also visible were nodes I didn't know existed, like the cervical nodes - which must be miniscle on a normal dog, but were bigger than 1.5cm on this poor animal.

2300: Went out for a drink at the local tonight. Good time had. Coke good. Vewy good.