The Longest Day Ever

Three posts in one day, what is this?! So much happened, so many stories!

I'm going to admit a secret. I'm not actually writing this on wednesday. As you can imagine, three posts' worth of stories also meant I was completely exhausted that day. It may be a blogging faux pas, but I quite often write posts and sneak them into the archives 1984-style. I guess it's because the blog also functions as a diary and I like to keep things in a mostly chronological order. It's very likely that posts will continue to pop up "in the past" as I write them and then pretend nothing's changed.

I almost didn't write this one, because I already told the major "stories" (my wuss of a patient and the rabbit castration) and this is going to be more rambly. However, I decided I couldn't not mention my first real surgery.

Somehow, I went from having zero patients, to one medicine patient (that I kind of commandeered from the medicine student) and two surgeries. One of my roster-mates was scheduled to do both a spey and a castration today, so she suggested trading her castration today for my castration on friday. This was after the clinician offered the rabbit castration to me, so I accepted both quite happily. I also wanted to stick with my original patient and find out what the results of her urinalysis were, which naturally led into me also doing up her meds and discharge.

The castration was interesting because the dog is participating in a study looking at the effects of bupivicaine, a local anaesthetic, in the injection site. He was one of the controls, so didn't get any bupivicaine, but he still got hooked up to an EEG all during the surgery. I also got to work with a vet that I haven't seen before or since, who turned out to be a really nice guy and an amazing help. My friend did her surgery with him as well, and we agreed he had the perfect balance of explaining what to do, but allowing us to actually do it ourselves. He was thorough, patient, and supportive. (To be fair, almost all the vets are like that, except for one surgeon that I have been calling eats-students-for-breakfast in previous posts). But this guy is mysterious because, like I mentioned, no one has seen him around the hospital except for that one day.

The reason I called this the longest day ever isn't because of the actual hour total. Last week on referral surgery I had a few 12-14 hour days. But this day was so exhausting. I did my dog castration, my rabbit castration, chased a vet all over the hospital to talk about all three of my patients--including what meds to do and for how long, specifics on the discharge information and home advice, and writing up the surgery report. What really sent me over the edge was a big practical lab in the afternoon, about dentistry.

These labs apparently happen every wednesday afternoon and are mandatory. As usual, I was late, because I had to do all those things for all my patients. The lab started at around 4pm, and I had been standing and moving around all day, so I was already tired. I don't find dentistry particularly exciting, and this lab was exactly the same as the lab in fourth year (severed heads and all), our dead dogs a few weeks ago, and the actual dentals we did on monday. Clean teeth, extract teeth, queue up for the drill. Zzzzzzz. Ten or fifteen minutes into it, I was sagging on my stool, while the person next to me kept nodding off. Important as it is, a lab like this really needs to be in the morning, not 4pm. I ran off to discharge my rabbit patient before I completely fell asleep.