Arriving Like Students, Leaving Like Doctors

September 3, 2024

Mackenzie Pope, AVC 2025, travelled to Nain and Postville as one of the student participants on the Chinook Project. As part of the experience, the students craft various pieces of writing.

After a long day of travel and unboxing supplies, before shutting out the lights to head back for the night, we paused and looked around at our makeshift clinic. A community hockey rink turned hospital - equipped with medicine appointment rooms, a pharmacy, recovery beds, an operating room and all. It's hard to put into words how I felt in that moment, overcome by excitement and anticipation for weeks to come. 

It wasn’t until I returned to my room that it hit me… I’m scheduled for a surgery tomorrow, which I’ve never performed before. I’ve performed feline ovariohysterectomies (spays) in junior surgery, but this would be my first canine one. Although similar, in dogs, especially larger deep-chested breeds, the surgery can be a bit more challenging due to the size of the dog.

Mackenzie in Surgery

Canine ovariohysterectomies (spays) are also often more vascular, increasing the risk of hemorrhage. I woke up early the next morning to study the procedure and review the anatomy, the steps, the suture patterns. I’m the president of the surgery club at vet school, I’m supposed to feel ready for this kind of thing, right? Wrong. The transition from textbook to real life was daunting! 

The first day was challenging. I quickly realized how good we had it at school in our surgical suites with our large sterile fields, instrument tables, operating lights, and surgical assistants (It’s surprisingly more difficult with a headlamp and no one to trail your suture!). At the end of day one I was feeling a bit discouraged by my surgical skills. I had practiced for hours on my suturing pad, but my knots were not buried deep enough. I had been pulling even tension on my suture, but I still found myself redoing throws (parts of knots). 

As the first week unfolded, I started to gain more and more confidence with each new day. I jumped at every chance to scrub into surgery and felt increasingly better about my surgical skills. By the middle of week two, things which were once daunting and frustrating felt like second nature. We were creating anesthetic plans, placing intravenous (IV) catheters, intubating, monitoring anesthesia, performing surgeries, seeing medical appointments, and discharging patients with ease. 

When I reflect on my experience with The Chinook Project, I am amazed by how much we learned and all that we accomplished as a team. At the airport en route to Labrador, Dr. Foley said to us, “Teams choose to succeed,” and we were a team that chose to do just that. I’m grateful for the encouragement, the eagerness to lend a helping hand, and the fun-loving nature of our team. I’m grateful for our conversations around the breakfast table, pep talks in the middle of a surgery, and evening debrief huddles. Ultimately, I’ll be forever grateful for this experience, the people who made it so memorable, and the profound impact it had on me, both personally and professionally. 

This was the most transformative experience of veterinary school for me. I found a new sense of confidence in myself and my abilities at the operating tables and exam rooms in Labrador. I arrived feeling more like a student and left feeling more like a doctor.