Gonzai Gallery

I don't know what it is about benefits for animal charities, but nobody buys my stuff. I barely made my expenses, and as it turned out, I need not have bothered with anything other than Ravens & Orioles. Nothing else drew interest at all. Still, I did better than two of my three 'roommates', one had a single sale and the other had none. (The fourth cleaned up. Go figure.) But I met lots of doggies, plus some rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs and bunnies. I had help from my buddies Jim and Jeff, so it was a easy and social occasion if naught else. Trying to decide if I should bother with another show, I need the money but do I need the aggravation?

'twas a fine day at the fair, if underattended. Only little kids, and the only people between 15 and 60 were the parents of said little ones. Also grandparents with little ones, and a lot of seniors and special needs adults. I was decidedly an oddball at the fair.

At any rate, I met a lot of critters and gave a lot of nose pats (and in a couple cases, neck massages), which made me many new friends. I saw a piglet being born, and many baby goats were in attendance. I want one! Despite being sneezed on by a few, my glasses and shorts are now well coated with goat snot. Stopped in the Exhibition Hall to raid the candy store (bad me) and stopped to chat with the Obama campaign folks. Got a bumpersticker and this time I really mean to put it on the car. Also bought a pit lamb sandwich for Mom, and a Fair t-shirt, but I was most tempted by a shirt with the World's Most Interesting Man on it, which read "I rarely Hate, but when I do, I hate the Pittsburgh Steelers." Awesome.

But it's the pictures you want, right?

( Photos! )

Or not, as the case may be. National treasure Charles Pierce weighs the options for getting a cow out of the house. http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Moos_Of_The_World

Well, hopefully I'm done. I had a lot of paperwork to be signed by my 'supervisor', except I never really had one and even with shadowing, I worked with 9-10 different people. There was a lot of buckpassing before I conceded and had one of the vets sign my timesheet, at least. I left the student evaluation for the coordinator, because nobody wanted any more paperwork at that point! (Some 25 or so surgeries today.)

The surgeries included a pair of sugar gliders that were there to be neutered. Seems like microsurgery to me! They were pretty cute and slept in odd poses. There was a rat that came in for emergency surgery - several inches of her tail had the skin stripped off when the tail was caught in her cage door, so they amputated it. The rat was really amiable under the circumstances. But tops of the night was one of the first - a boxer and her puppies. One of her puppies never actually was born and was stuck inside her, so the whole gang came to the hospital for Mom to have surgery. Four week-old pups. Adorable. And their mother was very concerned for her babies. Nice that they could stay together.

So now it's some online assignments and wait for the final class in mid-February.

It was popular this evening. We were brought a starling and two cats, all feral, by would-be saviors. The starling had flown into a window; it died from its injuries, nothing really to do for it. One of the cats had feline AIDS and may very well have been exposed to rabies, so we put it down rather than take chances. The other cat tested negative for disease, so it will get a shot at surviving with the person who found it. It was otherwise pretty quiet tonight. I learned to run feline HIV tests and canine heartworm tests. Still gotta get some vaccine experience, and get some of things I have done validated. Tomorrow, tomorrow...

I've been hot and cold the last 24 hours and very itchy. The itchiness, in particular, seems to have usually struck me in conjunction with pollens, in other words, allergies. I appear to be allergic to something I was exposed to yesterday.

So would that be dogs, cats, rabbits or something else related to an animal hospital? No way I go through this whole thing and then discover I'm allergic to some part of the job. No freakin' way.

Night 2 of my internship was a night of death. My first assignment when I arrived was to 'bag' a dog - that is, put a euthanized dog into a garbage bag and then take it out to a freezer until it could be taken for cremation. The dog, Raven, was a 12yo, 90 pound husky whose sobbing owner I had passed in the hallway. Raven had terminal cancer and wasn't responding to treatment. It took two of us to get her body into the bag, and due to her size, we carried her out on a stretcher. Naturally they had me go backwards, and I slammed my bad hand into a doorframe. But we managed to get the bag to the freezer. While there we had to retrieve another bag; an owner had decided they wanted a lock of hair from their pet. So we carried the bag back into the office, opened it, shaved some hair from the dog's head, then closed it back up and took it back to the freezer. Later in the evening an ancient Boston terrier was brought in and the techs were putting a catheter in her leg. Silly me, I asked what was up. Maggie was being euthanized. She seemed really alert and friendly, but apparently besides being 14 she was having seizures several times a day. Fortunately I didn't have to 'bag' Maggie, because a triage had come in.

There were 4 triages during the 3 hours I was there, and I spent a lot of my evening taking car of one of them, Oki, a mutt. Everytime a vet tried to check Oki, an emergency would crop up, so I'd watch Oki again. (He had a severe allergic reaction to something.) Oki wound up as probably the only non-sad story of the evening; besides his problem being simple, I took him back to his owner who was thrilled to see his buddy back and eager to talk about his dog. So that was nice. The other triages also turned out to be not too bad. But when I wasn't watching Oki, I was looking after the animals in the ICU. The ferrets were a hoot, especially Larry, who was finding great amusement in flipping over his food dish. But James the cat popped his stitches and it took forever to get him to stay still long enough to restitch him. Another cat had been abandoned at the hospital by the owners, who decided the cat was just too mean to bother with anymore. (I can attest that the cat is nasty.) A sweet Dachshund, Fritz, hurt his back and was paralyzed. And poor Jetta the Rottweiler. She woke up a couple days ago and couldn't move any of her legs. Her owners brought her to the hospital, said they couldn't afford to treat her and left her. The poor girl still can't get up, and she's very confused and hurt. I spent a lot of time with her.

Throughout the entire evening, a vet was operating on the deformed leg of a 3 month old pup, Simba. Simba was under anesthesia from 3pm on, which is...too long for a puppy. His blood pressure kept crashing. They finally got him stable around 9pm and finished the surgery, but when they started stitching him up he crashed entirely. They worked on him for half an hour with injections, CPR, paddle shocks, etc. but they couldn't save him. I stayed late to see what happened with Simba, but I left right after. Enough death for one night.

So yesterday when posting about the State Fair, I was griping about memory cards. The reason being that for the first time ever, I ran out of memory before I ran out of battery in the camera and I forgot to bring an extra card. The reason I needed/wanted another card? Ben & Jerry.

No really, this makes sense.

This is a 3 year old Jersey cow. She had a rough day yesterday.

She was on display at the State Fair because they figured (correctly) that she was going to give birth imminently. What they didn't know was that her calf was going to be a breech birth, or that he wasn't alone. They had to call in a vet, who shoved the baby back into his mama, then grabbed both legs and yanked him out. How rude.
( Babies! )