By Lee Wesselius (vet student and QES Scholar)

Hello everyone, the sun has finally come out for the last few days after several weeks of mostly cloudy weather. The area is still very dry however as we haven’t had considerable rain in around 2 months. I’m sure the locals wouldn’t mind one day of rain anytime soon.

The vet team enjoying a cup of tea: Ashley, me, and Remmy

As Ashley mentioned in her last blog, we have all been given Kimeru names based on our personalities. The name given to me is Murithi which means someone who enjoys dealing with livestock. Given my farming background and my current pursuit of a veterinary degree, it was a good fit.

Making a new friend

Over the past couple weeks, we’ve managed to stumble onto a few interesting cases. The first one was a case of a prolapsed vagina in a dairy cow at the biggest farm in the area. In order to resolve this case, we cleaned it up, pushed it back into the cow and sutured the cow to hopefully prevent it from reoccurring. We also performed a castration at another farm on a big bull. Having only experienced castrations using a surgical approach, we decided on a bloodless approach this time. Finally, we saw a suspected case of actinobacillosis which resulted in a large swollen face. On the first day, we administered a diuretic and anti-inflammatory and came back the next day with sodium iodide to finish the treatment. The swelling had already significantly reduced by the next day and hopefully the sodium iodide will take care of the infection. The administration of the sodium iodide is done intravascularly and presented a bit of a struggle for us as we had to restrain the cow and deal with the cow trying to move around a lot.

The bull that lost some of his masculinity

Being able to do veterinary work with cows every day all day has allowed me to gain some valuable experience that should help me out immensely next year in vet school. I’m starting to gain some confidence diagnosing pregnancies over 2 months old through palpation.

The cow with suspected actinobacillosis

We are now in the homestretch of the Kenya trip with less than three weeks remaining. We are all enjoying our time here but also looking forward to being home in Canada.

Until next time,

Lee “Murithi” Wesselius