Caution may be disturbing

The Dog that I wrote about in my last posting, the one that was tick infested and had the waterry blood was radiographed and had metal lucency in the stomach.  The ticks were sent to the parasitology lab to be tested for tick borne diseases.  This next week I will do is a rotation in cardiology.  I am looking forward to helping the cardiologist all week.  The pictures to follow are of my first week, that I spent in large animal.  I went to the diagnostics lab to see the necropsy of a bull that had abscesses show up on the ultrasound the doctors performed.  They were riddled through out his GI system and reproductive tract.  While I was there they started investigating the reason why this horse had neurological symptoms.  The pictures after the bot larvae pictures are of the insides of the bull.

horse being prepared for necropsy.  Euthanized because of neurological disease. 

Bot fly larva in the horses stomach. Not the reason for neurological signs but a very interesting finding.

Horses stomach with bot fly larva.  The adult flies land and lay eggs on the hair of the horse.  The eggs on the hair are small and are difficult to get off the hair shaft.  The horse grooms itself and ingests the egg. 

Large hair twine ball found in one of the stomach compartments of the bull, not an uncommon finding.  Cows are indiscriminate eaters.  Often junk finds it's way into the stomach of cows. 

abscess cavity on the wall of the omasum of the bull.  The four compartments of a cows stomach are the rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum.

another large abscess on the outside wall of the omasum

The viscera

abscess on the testicle and a small one on the epididimus(spelling?)

purulent material (pus) from one of the abscesses in the GI

The poor guy himself

lobuled kidney rather than the bean shaped one of humans

reproductive tract of the bull

If you enlarge this photo you can see the villi of the rumen. 

I hope you enjoy my post if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them.  Sometimes when I write this blog I miss alot of what I am experienceing.  Questions help me flesh it all out.  So again if anyone has questions I would love to tell you more.  I am mostly focusing on the large animal side of my experiences, because that is what I am more interested in, but I do have many small animal stories that need some encouragement to compound on.