Category — Only a vet

Bunny (c) sarnibil1 of Flickr.com

There’s a couple of important things, dear reader, that I would like you to know about rabbit medicine.

• If you can’t fix a bunny for under $60, most people will put it to sleep instead
• Little bunnies are usually owned by little children, for some of which it is the first living thing they’ve truely cares for other than their family.
• Regardless of what the primary problem was, if it’s not something that’s an immediate threat to the bunny chances are the bunny now has Gut Stasis.
• Gut Stasis is what’s going to kill it.
• I can treat gut stasis. This involves force feeding bunny special food as often as possible.

Which is why it’s often difficult to see a sick bunny, even if you have a fairly good idea of what’s wrong.  Even if you don’t know what’s going on, it’s probably gut stasis.

And no parent is going to feed a baby bunny all through the night. They’ve had enough of that with their own child, the reason they have this stupid bunny in the first place. [Read more →]

Occasionally at work I have to service a number of branch clinics, each about an hour away from home  base. It’s not a bad (but long) drive and it takes all day to see the three clinics, so it’s usually not too bad. The first two are supposed to be quieter, allowing some time for lunch, but not on my day.

I arrived at the second clinic 30 minutes early so I could have lunch, but the lady with the keys hadn’t arrived and the carpark was already filling up with people and pets.

So I started seeing patients in the carpark while I waited for the clinic to open. The work was steady and I ended up running overtime trying to see everyone. The next clinic (which I arrived late to) was no better- as busy as all the others had been.

So it was approaching 4:30, after an unusually busy day, in which I hadn’t had any food since 7:30 this morning, when I went to the housecall that I had promised to do.

Let me explain something to you: Housecalls Suck. They seriously suck, which is a big reason why most vets don’t do them anymore. You can’t control the environment, you usually don’t have all the equipment you’d want for every eventuality and you don’t have trained nurses to handle the animals with you. Not only that, but you’re in somebody else’s house and they always have great expectations. Everything just makes it harder to be a medical professional.

Not only that, but the sort of people who insist on housecalls and refuse to come to the clinic tend to be a little crazy.

[Read more →]

I did something nice on very short notice for an older couple and their dog today. It wasn’t a huge medical procedure, but I fixed their dog up faster than they were expecting and he got to go home sooner rather than later. As they paid their bill and thanked me for the speedy work the woman smiled sweetly and handed me a brightly coloured book.

“You look old enough to have young kids of your own so I thought they’d like this book about -my dog-.”

“………Thank-you………”

While I did thank her kindly at the time and assured her that while I don’t have kids of my own one of the other vets does, I couldn’t help but be a little taken aback.

I’m twenty three years old.

Just twenty three and two months old, to the day.

I am not old enough to have young kids of my own!

Do I look so haggard, so drained and so stressed that my appearance has aged something like seven years?