Oncology Rotation
I no longer know what number rotation this is, I just know what semester it is.
I surprised myself by having quite a bit of fun on this rotation. It was amazing to learn so much about different types of cancer, how they work, where they spread, and how to treat them. Yes, I saw animals who had cancer, but being that I am in a tertiary care facility, these owners typically come to the teaching hospital fully intending to provide the very best care within their means. Only one of my appointments ended up leaving without pursuing further treatment.
The most important thing I learned is that chemotherapy is done much differently in our veterinary patients than it is in humans. The goals in these two houses of medicine are very different. The main reason for this is our life expectancy. In human medicine, an oncologist is going to give chemotherapy at doses to try and cure your disease in order to give you those extra decades of life. In veterinary medicine, most of our patients do not have a decade left of a normal, healthy life expectancy for their breed when they are diagnosed. Giving chemotherapy in veterinary medicine is mostly done to control metastatic disease or for inaccessible tumors and is not given at the doses it is in human medicine.
What this really boils down to is that the horrific side-effects we see in humans are not the same in our veterinary patients. GI side-effects like vomiting and diarrhea do occur, but we send home symptomatic treatment for those things. We monitor labwork for changes. Less than 10% of veterinary patients must be hospitalized due to side-effects of their chemotherapy. I feel that so many of the clients came in with a serious misconception about chemotherapy in veterinary medicine.
Immunotherapy is relatively new to veterinary medicine with a good example being the melanoma vaccine which trains the immune system to attack melanocytes.
I also got to spend some time with our radiation oncology service which was very cool. Radiation therapy can be used in a palliative setting, to clean up surgical margins, to go where surgery cannot. I got to treat everything from dogs, cats to llamas and pigs. It was very cool. The most interesting side-effect is that hair within the radiation field will turn white permanently.
My clinical skills improvement was massive on this rotation as every patient comes in for bloodwork prior to chemotherapy administration. This meant I got to practice a lot of jugular venipuncture since we save peripheral veins for giving chemotherapeutic agents. I got to practice taking biopsies of various sorts, design staging protocols for my patients, do a lot of cytology, and (my least favorite bit) do a very thorough rectal exam.
My hours were great during this rotation and now it’s on to my second dermatology rotation.
