Category — Hopes and Dreams

Today’s post is once again brought to you by Dr Ugg.

Infectious diseases are all around us. But they’re a whole lot less of the medical battle than i first thought. When i went to uni i was naive and thought a lot of the stuff i’d learn would be about bugs and germs and things we treat with drugs. A lot of it is but less than i thought. There’s parasites, which are kinda different. There’s kennel cough and parvo and cat flu and a variety of other interesting things. But mostly we see the same bugs over and over, and we treat them the same because it works.
To prevent the spread of disease between infected animals, we have specific protocols. Contagious things go in isolation. What “isolation” is varies between clinics, but the outcome is the same. Absolutely as few bugs (viruses or bacteria) get out from the sick animal into the rest of the clinic. Not on our feet, our hands or our clothes. But thats not the isolation i was wanting to talk about.

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Today, I feel like a Fairy Godmother.

Very keen for dinner time!

Remember that cat I took in who had been hit by a car? Three anaesthetics and a month later and he’s a normal cat, except for one lump (a haematoma that will shrink) and slightly crooked front teeth. He was eating normally, bright and active. Probably too active for a person living alone who comes home utterly beat after doing what often turns out to be an eleven hour day. As such, his original owners (who loved him very much, but other life circumstances meant they wouldn’t have been able to syringe feed him at the time) received a phone call on Wednesday informing them that we was a normal cat once more and just wondering if they had room for a cat in their life again.

Turns out my little cat had a buddy back home. A young kid about waist high that probably wasn’t even in pre-school yet, who had grown up with this cat, he slept in his bed at night, and had been asking for days when the cat was coming home, and then why he wasn’t coming back. [Read more →]

I had been working for 5 days before my first night on call. I was worried about how I’d handle an emergency, even though I was the backup vet on call. I think every new vet worries about these things. I secretly wonder if some of the more experienced vets worry about these things.

I had been feeling pretty good about surviving my first week as a vet, so as a celarbration I had bought a somewhat less-than-thrilling hamburger from the shop down the road. I regretted the burger when I was eating it (not at all worth $7). I regretted it even more as it left me puking my guts out every half hour, whilst suffering acutely violent diarrhoea from 8pm to 4am.

I was as sick as a parvo puppy and I was almost in an emergency clinic, not fit to be veting for one. [Read more →]