Afterthoughts

I spent the proverbial 40 days doing piglet post-mortems, rectal swabbing and Salmonella isolating and can now safely say that anyone who waves anything to do with piglets at me for the next few months is going to get punched.

In all seriousness, I learnt a lot both from my own escapades, and from watching the masters at work - all the PM room staff are excellent at what they do, and work to a standard I can only dream of attaining. I had a great time working in the Pathology department and was priveleged to be allowed to stay and shadow them all for 6 weeks. Hopefully one day I'll be able to return the favour!

Although my project is officially over, there are still things I need to do. RM wants a ‘basic guide’ to stillbirths/mummies/perinatal mortalities, so the farm workers can identify these themselves in future. I also have to write up a report for the Salmonella we isolated – although whether that is to be an official report for the vet school, or just one for myself to use as a case report, I don’t yet know.

It has to be reported to DEFRA that we isolated Salmonella – either the lab or RM will do that – and a treatment plan for the farm formulated. This might involve taking more bacterial swabs of various rooms and the slurry pits around the farm to try and identify where the problem is arising. I may have something to do with that when I go back to Glasgow, or I may not, depending on my timetable and RM’s availability.

But as the project is officially finished, this will be the last regular update of ‘Hog Day Afternoon’. If I get round to creating the basic guide and the Salmonella report, I will announce it here. Everyone reading this should know how to contact me, in one way or another, and those of you who are really (read: insanely) keen can request a copy of the finished article, if you are that way inclined.

For those who maybe don't see me very often, my regular blog is here. Although 'irregular' would maybe be a better word, as I don't update it half as often as I would like!

So a final thankyou to everyone out there who read this, and goodbye for now!

The week after the week before

Withdrawal easing, although I did PM the chicken I was having for dinner tonight.

Think this habit is going to take a while to break.

Spoke too soon...

Spoke too soon, and had to go up to the vet school this morning and hand in three library books that were pretending to be doorstops.

But I’m home now – so anything else that’s lurking about my flat in Glasgow can stay there until October!

Day 40

0850: Fingers crossed there won't be many errors...

0905: Joy of joys – just spoken to RM and I’ve only a few spelling mistakes and some more pictures to stick in, then I’m done!

0930: Nice people in the PM room are letting me use their computer to modify the rest of the photos set to go into my project, instead of me having to walk all the way home to do them, then all the way back up again.

1015: Finished! Printed off a hard copy and emailed the files to RM; it’s now out of my hands (literally and metaphorically).

1800: Had a fantastic day after I got the project finished – saw 6 cases being post-mortemed, then got to go for a drive out into the countryside with R to pick up resit exam papers.

I’ve left the vet school now for two weeks, and I’m heading home on Sunday for a break – I think I deserve one! Withdrawal symptoms are kicking in already though, and I’m missing R and M and the rest of the folks I’ve been hanging around with over the last few weeks.

Day 39

0900: Definitely have Salmonella, albeit stupid Salmonella that doesn’t realise it’s supposed to turn TSI agar black and not yellow. Ran the agglutination tests and proved it’s the same Group as the rest of the stuff I’ve isolated. Entered the results onto the computer and ran!

Going to need to spend the rest of the day working to get more of my report written. The results and discussion are taking forever; thinking of things to write is getting harder and harder, and was never really a strong point of mine in the first place.

My motivation for getting it finished tonight is that then tomorrow I’ll be free and be able to spend all day in the PM room – I’ve been missing my daily dose of butchering over the last week!

0100: Got to keep working!

0400: Got the CG-diagrams done and pictures cut, resized and inserted in the correct places. Now just have to pull the Discussion section together.

0500: Finally! I have a complete draft of the report, so relieved. Now to try and get some sleep…

Day 38

0810: *yawn*

0900: Bacteriology early again – sticking bacterial colonies from the agar into urea broth. Hopefully I’ll have some results by later this afternoon.

1700: Back to Bacteriology – and we have some Salmonella. Possibly. I stick the positives into TSI and stick them back in the incubator to see what happens.

1900: Argh! For spending most of last night awake, I didn’t get very far with the report – just started typing in some sections. I foresee more very late nights.

Trying to find RM today to go over some more of the report was quite difficult as he has so many things on at the moment. I finally managed to hunt him down, with the help of R, late this afternoon. He gave me a copy of the farm records that the farmer finally got round to sending him this morning – going to have to integrate these into my own results and see what happens!

0200: Took hours tonight trying to reconcile my results with the farm records – in some cases the figures I have are so different from the farm’s that I wondered at times if I was looking at the right spreadsheet. In many cases, piglets have suddenly appeared, as if by miracle, and where before there were maybe 10 born alive, now there were 12. In other cases piglets disappeared, and one sow, complete with her litter of piglets, disappeared completely after I looked at her. So I spent a considerable amount of time tonight – over three hours – trying to bring the two sets of results together.

I really can’t see why there’s such a difference. I know my figures are correct – when I open a bag, and see three dead piglets and a placenta, I know that that particular sow had three dead piglets. How, on the farm records, the same sow suddenly has two deaths is beyond my understanding, unless of course, the farm workers can perform miracles, and one of the dead piglets was resurrected from the skip at the PM room and magically transferred back to the farm…

Apart from that, I got a fair amount done. Have something written in the Results and Discussion sections now, so at least tomorrow I have something to work with. Whether or not it’ll make sense when read by someone who’s fully conscious remains to be seen.

Day 37

1400: Went to Bacteriology early this morning to inoculate the broth from yesterday onto agar – today’s were slightly quicker than last weeks as I only had 26 samples and not 31!

1700: Managed to find RM at several points during the day, then ran home early to buckle down and concentrate.

1712: Concentration waning.

1720: Very bored and taking a dinner break.

2200: Too much to do and not enough hours in the day! Help!

0200: Bed looking very inviting. Must not give in to temptation.

0400: Not actually tired any more, but I think if I want to function tomorrow I should probably go to bed now…

Day 36

0900: Last day of collection today. Arrive in to find two very heavy boxes awaiting me. Turns out, on the same day, one sow had an amazing 12 stillborn piglets (with 7 born alive – a staggering 19 in total) and another had 7 stillborn (with 10 born alive), both from the old house. Which completely changes the results! Argh!

1300: By the time everyone had come to look at the 20 mortalities (before you say I can’t count, there was another piglet born dead in another litter), and RM and R had finished taking pictures, and I had opened up every piglet and recorded weights, pathology and category, it was almost lunch time. Typical.

1900: Went off to the farm to obtain the last batch of salmonella samples at 2pm. Today we were looking at the weaner pigs housed on flat decks in one house, and a hospital pen in another house. I was a bit unsure at first as to whether the flat decks would hold my weight, but RM assured me I wouldn’t fall into the slurry below. Thankfully, he was right. The pigs were very cute (think Babe in the movie of the same name) and it was hard to grab one and stick a swab you-know-where to get a sample, until one bit my foot. Then I had no qualms about it!

On the way back to the car we found another bag of material left out for me to look at. And I thought we were finished! We took it back to the vet school and I looked at it after I’d stuck all our samples into tetrathionate for the night.

Made sure to bring boxes and body bags away from the farm so I don’t have more stuff to look at later this week!

1800: Having trouble concentrating on project report.

1900: Stressed exam resit student come round to visit.

2200: Stressed exam resit student gone, and has left behind a stressed summer project student!

Day 33

0930: No material this morning. I took the time to go and start sorting through the results. At the moment, the old house is outperforming the new house in terms of stillbirths and dead piglets at farrowing time, so it looks like I won't have to formulate a business plan after all. Not that I'm complaining!

RM has decided that we'll have one more day of data collection, on Monday, as we're going up to the farm then to get the last of the Salmonella samples. Which means at least one more morning in the PM room! Although it also means I can't start properly analysing my data until Monday evening :(

1500: A foal has just been brought into the PM room from the horse hospital on site, with horrific injuries to its legs - it looks like it was caught somewhere for a period, maybe in a fence or cattle grid. All legs have cuts and scratches, and on two legs there are huge gaping wounds, through the tendons and down to the bone.

1530: Chief pathology lecturer has just appointed me in charge of the PM room and the two technicans, R and M, until he gets back! He's busy and can't come to look at the foal, so he says I have to decide what photographs to get and what tissue samples to take.

1531: Being in charge, I delegated responsibilityto R and told him to decide what photos to take.

1630: Relieved of responsibility, and just in time. Senior horse lecturer arrived to see what was wrong with the foal, and started asking me questions about what was wrong with it and what was abnormal. It turns out the foal was stuck in a wire fence - we were right!

Need to go and revise equine forelimb anatomy.