On a More Positive Note....

See? I told you my next post would be mostly a positive one. It's hard to get more positive than a bulldog puppy, or as I like to refer to them, cuteness in its purest physical form. The pup was only visiting the hospital to get its next round of vaccines, but I still demanded to take the time to see/play with it. I mean, come on.....wouldn't you?

Onto things that I've worked with over the past week. A young boxer came in with a huge abscess under and behind it's jaw (it was about the size of a grapefruit). The kicker though for this scenario is that the owners were a young couple from NC just visiting for a relatives high school graduation. Just over the course of this weekend, that abscess grew to the size that we observed. The vet recommended that the walls of the abscess be taken out down in NC, but still offered to open it up and place a drain in it to help prevent it from growing. We did as such and as soon as the dog was awake from anesthesia, we could tell it was feeling a lot better. It was amusing watching the vet teach the clients how to replace a bandage over the dogs neck that involved using a baby diaper.

One of the more amusing appointments I saw involved a morbidly obese Golden Retriever. The owner was a great, older gentlement (my guess was late 70's) who was a real card, and a pleasure to work with. While I was checking in the appointment before the doctor visited, he asked me why she was panting so heavily all the time. I tried to be professional and politically correct by responding with, "Well, we'll see what the doctor thinks, but it may have something to do with her size." Later, partway through the doctor's exam of the dog, the client said, "Yeah, I asked your student here why she's breathin' so heavy and he said it's cuz she's FAT!" Thankfully, the doctor just assumed I didn't say it like that because I wasn't about to correct the client, especially since he was saying it in a jovial manner.

This past week I was able to work with a number of different birds: a couple parakeets, a couple African grey parrots, some cockatiels, and a conure. I love working with the African greys because they like to talk to you while you handle them (even though they aren't readily handled). While I found it fascinating learning how to work with birds, my experiences at this clinic just further reinforce how I will most likely avoid them entirely post graduation. For those of you who have never owned a bird, they are by far and away the most frail creatures on this planet. Not only can you easily break their bones while removing the metal rings around their legs (or just from handling), they can literally die just from the stress of handling. The latter happened last week. A bird was brought in because the owner noticed it got its leg caught in something in its cage and just wanted to drop it off at the hospital for x-rays and to make sure everything was ok. The bird was left overnight, and the next morning a technician took the bird out to measure its weight. I observed the technician and he was not overly forceful with the bird by any means, but after taking the weight and placing it back in it's cage, it literally just tipped over and died. While the vets do explain to every bird owner how this can happen, the phone call still has to be made to the client. To be quite honest, it's not one I'd like to make.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned as I post a bunch of pictures from my time at this clinic!