Merrilee Gallagher-Outlaw Equine Hospital(Week 1)

Posted in: Pinhead Intern Blogs, Merrilee Gallagher, 2024 Interns
Tags:

Hello everyone!

My name is Merrilee Gallagher, and I’m excited to share that this summer, I have an incredible opportunity to intern at Outlaw Equine Hospital and Rehabilitation Center. Outlaw Equine and Rehab Center is renowned for its state-of-the-art facilities and expert team dedicated to the health and well-being of horses. Outlaw is located in Decatur, Texas, right outside Fort Worth, Texas. My internship will be for a month and I will work in the ICU with the technicians and other interns. Outlaw Equine offers onsite furnished housing for interns and externs, I have been staying on-site in my own room with four other interns. The schedule is pretty rigorous, it consists of 12-hour long shifts. However, I haven’t gotten off at my scheduled time since being here. They have been pretty busy so I’m okay with helping out even if it means not getting off at my scheduled time.

My first day was pretty difficult since I have not been in a facility like this before. In the morning, I quickly went with one of the technicians and started giving oral medicine to a lot of the horses. They have multiple barns and at the moment they have somewhere around 240 horses. Outlaw is very fast-paced so I had to and still do have to memorize all the different medicines and doses. I learned how to do a physicals, put on nebulizers for horses, how to get everything set up for a catheter, giving salt water drips to horses. The first day it was very busy and they had multiple colic horses come in. I watched them give an endoscope procedure to one of the foals. An endoscope procedure is where they stick a meter-long cord up the nose to the back of the cheek to look for strange mucus in horses with strangle disease. Some of the horses can be very difficult to give oral medicines to, at moments they could kick you so you have to be careful at all times. I’ve learned a lot so far and I’m excited to continue to move forward in this journey. I’ve always had a passion for animal/equine care and this is how I’ll figure out if this career path is really for me.

Their medicine cart

Their medicine cart

 

There are no comments published yet.

Leave a Comment

Change this in Theme Options
Change this in Theme Options
X