Hillary is Coming! Hillary is Coming!

Got in at ten of eight this morning and after a fair amount of chitchatting, we got down to surgery. Just two this morning—Maggie, a really adorable chocolate lab from a local breeder, and Miracle, a sweet little cat a nice couple rescued from a coalmine. It was cool to see the contrast between the two spays: Maggie was way bigger than Miracle (obviously), and her uterus was full of fat and big veins and stuff. I have pictures…somehow other people don’t find them as cool as I do. They just think it’s gross. I don’t get it. Anyway it was all very routine—I’m starting to memorize how to do a spay, but Christie says they’re actually the most technically difficult thing a vet will do aside from ortho. Neuters are easy: cut open, pull out ball and stringy thing, clamp, cut, stitch, cut, pull out other ball, etc.

            I got some lovely hands-on experience today! I shaved and washed Miracle before her spay, and afterwards I gave her a shot! Luckily she was just waking up from her surgery, so she was nice and sleepy and didn’t attack me. Before her spay, Josh put on a huge glove like the kind people who handle birds of prey wear and held Miracle while Christie gave her a knock-out drug (so we didn’t need to use gas during the surgery). As soon as the injection went in Miracle, who up until then was totally sweet, gave a howl and a scream, and proceeded to sink into a lovely sleep. Both surgeries went very smoothly. That pregnant cat never got dropped off last night, so we don’t know what’s going on with that. D.R came at 12:00 and we finished up at 11:30, so Christie gave me a run-down on anesthesia, and then we sat around and chatted away about Westtown and college and vet school and things.

            When we got home, I had some lunch, finished watching The Constant Gardener, and took a really long nap! It was supposed to be one of those “one hour power” naps, but I kept changing the alarm and eventually got up at 3:15. I took my camera outside and shot a role of 36 around the Holler. There’s a good six inches of snow on everything, so I got some great wintertime shots. Also, D.R looked like a garden gnome in his coat, so I took some of him, well, looking like a garden gnome! I can’t wait to print them! A nice pasta dinner, followed by playing solitaire on my iPod and watching Hillary speak at the St. Clairesville high school. All the vets went to see her-I think it’s a pretty liberal practice. And now I think I’ll take a bath! I don’t have to be in until 12:00 tomorrow. I wonder if the abortion-kitty will come in tomorrow…

Robin

P.S. I met The Cutest Puppy in the Whole Wide World today. His name was Sam, and he was a Saint Bernard puppy. Oh. My. God. I almost died when I saw him. He had these huge paws that he has to grow into and he was really clumsy but gentle and not annoying and bitey like most puppies. He was so sweet and soft and cute and mom and dad we HAVE to get one. Don’t you want a big ol’ Beethoven to climb on top of you in the morning and drool on your face? I think that would be great.

Everybody Loves a Cairn Terrier

I got to sleep in today! It was great, especially because I stayed up until 11:00 watching White Oleander—it might be my new favorite movie. Well, one of them. D.R got back from Olney for his lunch break at 12:15, and he dropped me off at the office at 12:30. The roads are getting progressively more disgusting—today it rained and then snowed, and tonight it’s supposed to freeze. Great. Anyway, as soon as I got in, things got going—Mandy (a woman who used to work there and is the daughter of Martha Ralston who owns the place and is the half-sister of Christie) had brought in Charles, her Cairn Terrier. He was limping, and seemed to have hurt his left foreleg paw, so Christie had to examine it—but Charles hates having his paws touched. I mean really hates it. Mandy held his head while Christie did it, and he made the most horrible sounds! It was this crazy tribal gurgling mixed with straight up “I’ll tear your leg off” growling. But he’s actually a really nice dog. All throughout his cacophony, his sister, Gladys (owned by Martha, as is Fergus, Charles’ brother) was barking her head off because she thought we were killing Charles. After all of that we gave him some fluids. I’m not really sure why; I guess to keep him hydrated—but the fluids had to go in under his skin. So Martha held an I.V bag up and Christie pinched a bunch of his skin and put the needle in, but he kept jumping around and the needle came out a few times and the stuff squirted everywhere…but eventually we got it in. 

Then a really cute widdle puggy-wuggy came in with a benign tumor on his cute widdle facey-wacey (I’m sorry. I just can’t speak normally when I see a pug, or even talk about them. They induce excessive baby talk that I can’t control). Christie and Sandra told the cute little old couple (yeah, everything was cute today) that the tumor was benign and that “these things usually go away on their own,” and Christie said she’d be happy to remove it, but anesthesia always poses some risk, and it would be purely cosmetic. The cute old people decided to let it go for a month.

            After they left, there was a lull in the action while everyone did some paperwork. I checked in all the cages and read all the charts to see what everyone was in for. A cat that had come in yesterday after I had left had a big cone on his head to prevent him from pulling out a little draining device on its leg. The owner thought he might have rabies since he wasn’t vaccinated and something bit him, so after Christie drained his abscessed leg she put him in quarantine. So he’ll be in that cage until next week, poor guy. There was a Shitzu named Roxy in for a dental cleaning (Christie’s fiancé’s uncle’s dog—did I mention how much I love small towns?), a huge beautiful Airedale named Arlen in to be neutered, a stray cat with an extreme case of ear mites complete with hematomas, and Otis, a silky terrier with awful teeth.

Otis went first because his incessant barking was driving everyone insane and we really wanted to sedate him. Apparently his owners had taken him to a vet because their groomer said his teeth were really bad, but the vet said his teeth were fine and that he didn’t need a dental at all. That vet needs to go back to vet school. Poor Otis had Stage 2 “Something I can’t pronounce that starts with a P and looks really nasty.” Basically his teeth were covered in tarter and some had rotted clean through. We had to pull out eight of his teeth. It was actually way bloodier than the surgeries from yesterday. I got to put on gloves and hold his mouth open so Christie could get the back molars. Poor Otis! We were all astonished that the other vet said he didn’t need a cleaning, and Sandra and Christie shed some light on veterinary politics. Hearing them talk about how “you never want to be the vet that talks about other vets to your clients” and “it’s okay to talk amongst your colleagues about the dumb vets who need more schooling, but never do it in front of clients,” made me want to be a vet right now! So badly! I want colleagues! And a scalpel! I am so destined to be a vet. All the blood and guts and weird noises and annoying clients and traumatizing car accident victims—I want it all! Weeeeeee!!

Christie is so nice, and she told Carolyn she loves me! Yay! And she explains so much to me, and while she’s explaining she’ll be like, “Do you know what ­­­_____ is? Of course you know what ­­­_____ is, you’re so smart!” It is so great.

So after Otis came Roxy. Her teeth were basically perfect since she’s only a year old, but her owners apparently said “her ass-breath is worse than usual,” and Christie really emphasizes dental (“I’m crazy about clean teeth!”), so she gave them a thorough cleaning anyway. And that was the day! Carolyn came just before we were going to start on Arlen, and I didn’t want her to have to wait or have to come back into town since the roads are so bad, so I left early. We got home and made some stir-fry for dinner. The democratic debate is on in 20 minutes, and we’re gonna watch it!

I can’t for tomorrow! Someone’s cat wasn’t spayed and it got outside and got pregnant, so Christie is performing an abortion! She said she’s done quite a few and she was like, “Yeah, I’ve got to watch out for those pro-life people—they might send me hate mail!” So that will be interesting. The owner thought she might have just gotten worms at first because of how big her belly was getting, so she gave her de-wormer. Martha said if she gave them one kind of de-wormer, the babies would already be dead, but the kind most people use wouldn’t kill them. I think it’ll be interesting to watch, but also a bit sad. Spaying the cat will make her live longer, but the babies will never get to live. Oh well, what do they know, they’re just embryos, right? Ah, moral ambiguity. We’ll see how things go tomorrow!

 

Robin

There’s a Chance They Named Their Library After Ian Hutton.

Woke up at 6:00 and headed off to Barnesville Elementary with Carolyn. The school looks remarkably like the elementary school next to Delta in State College. I Facebooked and helped Carolyn get set up for the day and I set off for the vets office at 10 of 8. The first half hour was incredibly awkward as all the vets came in—the secretary introduced me to everyone, but then they were all talking and pretty much ignored me. Christie (the main surgeon who I’m officially shadowing) was really nice, but then she was talking to everyone about a conference she had been at over the weekend at OSU, and everyone was bustling around and I really just felt like I was in the way. I asked the other main vet (I think her name was Sandra) if I should just go sit in the waiting room and read because I didn’t want to be in the way, but she and Christie both assured me that I wasn’t in the way and that the mornings are just crazy with everyone getting situated. Christie said the surgeries would get going in a minute, and they did—the first was an adorable (and rather high-strung) young dog named Brutus. Poor Brutus was being castrated, and you’d think he knew, the way he was whining! So Christie showed me how to anesthetize him and all the parts of the machine and how to insert the tracheal tube, and she said she would let me do that later on! While she was inserting the tube, she showed me how to pull out his tongue and “aim for the goal posts,” meaning put it in the trachea and not the esophagus. I noticed a little valve and asked if it was the epiglottis—she was very impressed with my vocabulary! Then Brutus got shaved and cleaned, and then WE CUT HIM OPEN!! It was so cool. I mean, it looked so easy! She just grabbed his ball and cut the skin and squeezed out the ball sac and then this long stringy thing, put clamps on it, cut it off and stitched it up! I monitored the his breathing and eye reflexes the whole time—meaning if I poked around his eye and he twitched it, he needed more drugs, so I would turn up the knob. We finished up and brought him out of the anesthesia by turning it off and rubbing him all over and talking to him (Christie says this helps them come out more quickly). Then we put him back in his cage on a nice soft towel and prepped for the next surgery—a spay and a de-clawing.

            Little Lily was up next, and this surgery was a bit more complex to set up because we all had to be much more sterile—I had to wear the “Lunch-Lady Hat”—because we were opening up her abdomen. Apparently cats have a reflex that dog’s don’t where when you the tracheal tube in, the close off their trachea, so Christie put some numbing drops in her mouth so she wouldn’t feel it going in.  After the tracheal tube went a kind of internal stethoscope so we could monitor her heart rate as well as her breathing. Christie said we could tell this cat was young and healthy and well loved because of the amount of subcutaneous fat—there sure was a lot of it! There was one part that looked especially tricky where she stuck her finger in the incision and felt around until she found a ligament that held the ovaries in place and had to break it by pulling on it with her finger. She said it really freaked her out at first, but then she got used to it and realized she wasn’t going to kill the cat. I asked her about a little blob I saw and she said it was purely vestigial so we could take it out. I asked her what it used to be used for, and again she was really impressed—she said I was probably the first intern who knows what vestigial means! Kudos to T. Tim.

            So we finished up with the spay and flipped her onto her side for the de-clawing. Apparently it’s one of the most painful procedures for cats—which makes sense since it’s not like Lily is going to walk on her stomach after her operation, but she is going to walk on her paws! Obviously…anyway for a de-clawing Christie exposes the whole claw and cuts away with a scalpel just in front of the bone. There is essentially no bleeding, but both paws get wrapped up in blue bandages and taped off so she looked like a boxer. It took her a little longer than Brutus to come out of anesthesia and once she was back in her cage she kept trying to walk around, but since her paws were all wrapped up she kept sliding around! She looked so pathetic and cute, but I felt bad for her. All of these animals get so traumatized by coming to the vet’s office, and it’s too bad they don’t understand that we’re helping them.

            So after that, the surgeries were done for the day and there weren’t a whole lot of clients, so I went down the block to Patrick’s to eat my lunch. The guy in there (potentially Patrick; owner, waiter, and chef) gave me some water and I said I had packed a lunch and I just needed somewhere warm to read my book. He was super nice and said that was just fine. A nice lady welcomed me to Barnesville and told me to enjoy my book. I did—I finished it. I know a bunch of ninth-graders didn’t like The Mysterious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, but I must say—you guys are a bunch of twerps! That book is so good! Well, except for the dog dying (but that’s over in the very beginning, not like fucking Where the Red Fern Grows or Shiloh or Sounder where they make you fall in love with the dog and then they make it die. That is just so uncool.), and all of the math was confusing, but I figured it would be better if I didn’t try to do the math. So I didn’t. And it was great. I read in Patrick’s for a while, and then went to check in with Carolyn and let her know I was going to the library so she could pick me up there. The security sure was tight for a small-town elementary school! The doors were locked and I had to talk into a buzzer/com thing and say that I was there to speak with Carolyn Stanley. They let me in and I had to sign in and get a visitors pass, even though I only needed to be there for like five minutes! So I read in the library for a few hours and picked out some movies for tonight. There’s a few inches of snow and some freezing rain in the forecast for tonight, so Carolyn might have a snow day—I don’t need to go in until 12:00 (that’s when Christie gets in), so it would actually be good if she was home tomorrow. Man I wish I had my license!!!! Okay parents, stop saying I told you so.

There are three or four surgeries scheduled tomorrow, including a dental cleaning. Christie and I had a funny conversation today about dog breath (the patient for tomorrow apparently has “ass breath”), and Josh, a vet tech, and I talked about losing animals and how it takes some getting used to and it’s always sad, but after a while you just accept it as part of the job. All in all, a great day.

Robin

P.S. I wold put pictures of Brutus' balls up here, but I forgot the camera cord thing, and also it might be a bit embarrassing for him.

Arrival

Ah, Barnesville. Upon entering the village, we stopped at a Subway where it seemed Carolyn and David knew everyone. A large bearded man in Car-harts joked with David about some ponies from the other side of town that had run away and adopted his field as their new grazing territory. A woman spoke to Carolyn for a bit and told her I was very pretty. How nice! I wished she was a hot teenage boy. David and I joked that they should tell everyone that they picked me up on the side of the road.

There's a few inches of snow on the ground, and the driveway is slick with ice. The dogs and cats were happy to see us--Jimmy is rotund as ever, Trixie looks like a small bear (I've never seen her with so much fur!), and Spud, although deaf and blind, acted like a puppy. Caught a glimpse of Gussied-Up, and Lito has grown larger still. We ate subs for dinner that we had gotten in Barnesville, and after a lovely shower I sat down to begin this blog! I'm off to work tomorrow morning, and I can't wait! 'm a bit nervous, but I'm sure all the vets will be very nice. It's been a while since I've had to pack a lunch--I think I'll be living off of PB and J for the next two weeks. My metabolism does not do wonders with being away from a refrigerator for extended periods of time.

Until tomorrow,

Robin