Cats are weird.

It's amazing how many different personalities of cats there are. Not even dogs, just cats. And their personalities usually change when they're at the vet versus at home. For example, I have two cats. My older cat, Tigger, an almost 10 year old 12 pound orange tabby, is more laid back. He occasionally gets a spurt of energy, but will spend most of his day laying in a sunny spot on someone's bed. Sprite is younger, not quite 2 years old, 8 pounds. She is very active. She's also very vocal and food motivated. She always greets me at the door when I come home, meowing and whining like crazy out of excitement because she expects food. This happens every time I come home, even if I was only gone for 2 minutes. And she doesn't do it for anybody else, just me. I've even taught her how to sit. Kind of. Anyways, she has such a different personality when she's at the vet. She just sits there, not wanting to move out of fear, she doesn't vocalize at all, and just clings to me. Tigger, however, will roam around the room and check everything out. Very different cats.

There was a cat in to be spayed today. She was weird. And slightly psychotic. When she was in her kennel, she would chew on the door, wrap her paws around it, and put her hind legs in the air, while screaming quite loudly. After her spay, she kept getting her cone off and licking at her incision. I could only wonder what this cat is like at home.

Other cats are really sweet when they're at home, or even with their owners at the vet, but the second you take them in the back, they turn into spawn of Satan. And then you can't do anything with them. You even look at them and they flip out. This is where a little miracle called DKT comes in handy. It's a mixture or "cocktail" of drugs that is the greatest thing invented for angry cats. It consists of dexmedetomidine, ketamine, and butorphanol. Within about 10-20 minutes of injecting the drugs, the cat is out. At this point, we can handle the cat and do whatever exam or diagnostics we need to do. We had a cat last week that came in for a dental, and as soon as I went to pick up his carrier, he started hissing and growling and just freaking out. We gave him DKT, let him sit and calm down for about 15 minutes, then took him out of the carrier. We drew his blood, placed an IV catheter, performed the dental cleaning, and then started waking him up. We didn't expect him to wake up so quickly, and as I was taking out his catheter, he growled and bit me. He was still pretty out of it, but awake enough to be freaking out again. I'm sure he's nice and sweet at home, but polar opposite while at the vet.

My least favorite cat breed is Siamese. Sure, they're intelligent, but they're loud and obnoxious and quite frankly, rather psychotic. My favorite breed is Maine Coon. They're big and long-haired, which is the main reason I probably won't actually get one, but they have the most mellow, laid-back temperament of any cat. And they have awesome green eyes. But, my overall favorite type of cat is a polydactyl brown tabby. For those of you who don't know what polydactyl means, literally it means "many toes". Polydactyl cats have extra toes, which means they have huge paws. I love it. And it's most common in brown tabbies, which I like even without 28 toes.

This is a picture of polydactyl cat paws. Aren't they awesome??

And this is the cat those paws belong to. He's a cutie. :)

This job gives a whole new meaning to "Blood, Sweat, and Tears"

I'm sure you guys are tired of hearing about my long days, but I just have to vent about this one.

I was on surgery again today. I don't know why, but I always seem to end up with the difficult surgery days. Five were scheduled: 4 dentals and a spay. Now, surgery appointments are supposed to drop off between 7 and 7:30 in the morning so we have plenty of time to run bloodwork and the doctor can do her exam and call the owners with any questions or concerns. Three of them showed up by 7:45; the other two didn't come in until after 8:30. The owner of these 2 pets told me, "I'm in a hurry, I really need to get going." Which really makes me want to question him as to why he decided to show up an hour late. --Frustration number 1.

Frustration number 2 begins with the scheduled spay. To start off, this dog was a 7 month old, 70 pound lab puppy. What's wrong with this picture?? a) Dogs and cats should be spayed or neutered by 6 months at the absolute latest. This is when they reach sexual maturity, and several complications can occur. For instance, if this dog we spayed today had been in heat, not only does that mean an additional charge of $65 for the owner, but a lot of extra bleeding in the abdomen, which can and will extend the time of the surgery. b) Performing abdominal surgery on a 70 pound puppy is not an ideal situation for many reasons. The larger the animal, the longer it takes for the incision to heal, allowing for opportunities for infection to occur. Also, the fact that this is a lab puppy (and a very untrained one at that), it will be very difficult to keep her from jumping and running around, tearing the incision open, thus allowing for even more opportunities for infection to occur. Infection means extensively longer healing time, pain and discomfort for the dog, being on antibiotics for several weeks, and more money spent by the client.

Part B of Frustration number 2: I mentioned earlier that this puppy is very untrained. I'm saying, like as untrained as a dog can be. First of all, as I was talking to the owner about what to expect for the surgery, the dog isn't sitting nicely beside him. Of course not, why would she? Instead, she is jumping up on me, thrusting her whole 70 pounds and long nails on top of me repeatedly while her owner just sits there and laughs. It's not funny. I wanted to tell him to get his dog off of me, and make her sit like she actually has some manners. Also, this dog hates going in kennels. It's not exactly easy to force a 70 pound dog into a kennel. Needless to say, I got my workout early in the day. To top it all off, these people have her littermate, an intact male dog, running loose in the house with her. They are so oblivious that they think just because their dogs are brother and sister, they won't make puppies. I mean seriously, do they know NOTHING about dogs?!?! It pains me to think about it. So we were worried that we might find little tiny puppies when performing the spay. Fortunately, though, we did not. Even so, the spay took almost 2 hours.

Frustration number 3: After our surgeries were finished, I was helping out everybody else around the clinic. One dog came in for a nail trim. I was thinking, this is gonna be quick and easy. Little did I know the dog had something different in mind. I was trimming the nails, and I quicked one of them. (For those of you who don't know, there's this thing called the quick inside of dog and cat nails. It's basically the blood supply. To quick a nail means to cut the part and make them bleed.) So I got some quickstop (powder to stop the bleeding), put it on the nail, and continued trimming. A couple minutes later, I noticed the nail was still bleeding. This dog was really worked up, so she probably had high blood pressure at the moment. I put more quickstop on it and finished the nail trim. When I was done, the nail was STILL bleeding. So what did I do?? That's right, I grabbed more quickstop. This time, I held it on the nail for a good 2 minutes before walking the dog back to its owner. No more bleeding, but by this point, half of the treatment room looked like a crime scene, as did my scrub pants. 

4th and final frustration of the day: We were so busy, I offered to stay past my scheduled shift and help people finish up things they needed to get done. I didn't mind, but I ended up staying until almost 7:30 after arriving at work at 6:30 this morning. 

So that's my day in a little more than a nutshell. Hopefully my future posts won't have as much venting in them. Also, I discovered this today and it made me laugh:

Conventions 101

I went to a convention today. The MVMA convention, to be exact. What does that stand for?? I'm glad you asked. The MVMA is the Minnesota Veterinary Medical Association. I've never been to a convention like this before, and I figured I would get a head start on my CE (continuing education) credits. I don't even have my paperwork for my certification yet, but it can't hurt to start early. I had fun, I learned a lot, I even saw a few people that I know. Plus, I got all this cool free stuff!

This is some of the cool stuff I got. Can't beat free!

I also got a leash. I put it on Sprite's collar to see how she would react. Let's just say she didn't really catch on to what it is and how to use it. Currently she is running around the house trying to figure out why this weird red string is chasing her.

I like conventions. Not just because I get free things, or because of the muffins (free muffins!). The whole point of this convention was to learn something. I learned quite a few things. I won't bore you with the details, but the classes I took were about how to handle aggression in dogs, and client education on preventive care. I'm so glad I went, because now I have learned several important things that I can implement in my clinic, and hopefully lead my co-workers to implement those things as well.

I've also decided that I need to be better about brushing my pets' teeth and giving them heartworm prevention every month. You people should do the same. If you want to know why, I'll be glad to start  a conversation with you via facebook or email, because it would take up way too much space if I wrote all my thoughts on the subject on here. 

Me with my name tag, just in case you didn't believe I was actually there. I was.

I had this incredibly good pizza today. Maybe it was so good because it was made by hand and it had all the natural grease that a slice of pepperoni pizza is supposed to have, or maybe the taste was amplified because of the fact that I wandered around for half an hour getting lost in the skyway system to find it. Either way, it was pretty darn good pizza. It was also the size of my face, which definitely helped with the taste factor. I had 2 face-sized slices. They were good.

One thing I learned about conventions: if you're going to one downtown, go on a Friday. Traffic is generally lighter than on any other weekday, especially around rush hour. Also, have an idea of where you are and what street you need to be on BEFORE exiting off 394 and hoping for the best. Downtown metro areas have WAY too many one way streets. And bad drivers.

Anyways, those are my novice convention experiences. Hopefully I'll be going back next year, and not just because I'll need 20 more free pens!

My crazy week, part 2

Day 4: Monday, February 3.
By this point, I had lost track of what day it was. Went in at 9. I'm just glad I got to sleep past 6. As soon as I got to work, though, appointments were filling up. Thankfully, most of the morning appointments were for vaccines, so those were pretty straightforward. But we had a lot of drop offs earlier in the day, including a dog that needed IV fluids all day. I hate IV fluids. Mostly because the fluid pump hates me, everybody else, and just life itself. It gets angry and starts beeping (very loudly, I might add) for no reason at all, then you have to reset it 20 times until it stops beeping. It also beeps every hour to tell you the fluids have stopped and the dog needs to be TPR'ed (stands for temperature, pulse, respirations), walked, and reset the fluid rate if needed. EVERY HOUR. It gets really obnoxious, especially with the LOUDEST fluid pump in existence. Anyways, the afternoon appointments were mostly sick pets. One in particular really annoyed me. It took a lot of convincing to get the owner to do diagnostics on a dog that potentially has kidney failure. Eventually, she agreed to let us do bloodwork and urinalysis. Because of all the appointments we had, we didn't get around to getting blood on this dog for about an hour. By the time we got samples and got results from the tests, it was 6:00. Finally, appointments were done for the day. The doctor called the owner of this dog, and of course the owner decides this late in the day that now she wants to go with the doctor's recommendation of taking radiographs of the dog's abdomen to look at its kidneys. Even though this was a small dog, he put up quite a fight when we were positioning him for the x-rays. We had to take multiple shots because he wouldn't stay still. Eventually, we got some good shots, and they were being sent electronically to a certified radiologist. But since it was so late, they wouldn't get them until the next day, so we told the owner to come pick him up. We were already past closing (7:00), and I didn't get home til 8:15. I'm pretty sure I hadn't sat down all day.

Day 5: Tuesday, February 4.
Another 7am day. I'm not even exactly sure what happened this day, it's all a blur. I just know I was at work from open til close. At some point, though, I went to the vending machine to get a snack. It wouldn't take my dollar because it wasn't straight enough. It's a very picky and pretentious machine. So I yelled at the machine for being stupid, went back and got another dollar, and it took this one. Good. Because that's the only other dollar I had. I punched in the numbers for the cheez-its that I wanted, and watched as the spiral-shaped prison slowly turned to release the bag of crunchy cheesy goodness from it's grasp, only to get stuck halfway. I almost cried. I was out a dollar, and I still lacked food. That's pretty much the only thing I remember from that day, and I'm not even sure that this was the day it happened. All of my days are starting to run together in a giant blur.

Day 6: Wednesday, February 5.
This was supposed to be the start of my 6 day weekend. That didn't happen. I was awakened yet again by a phone call from work. At least this time it wasn't until after 8:00. I ended up going in at 10, taking over a surgery shift for a tech that had gotten her wisdom teeth out 2 days before. I wasn't going to say no, because I know exactly how she felt. When I got my wisdom teeth out, I slept for 4 days straight, eating not much more than strawberry jello. So I went in for her to do a neuter and 3 dentals. Except there only ended up being 2 dentals. So that was a plus. All the surgeries went pretty smoothly, with only a couple of extractions. Then, after my break that I didn't take until 3:00, we had a golden retriever that we needed to get a urine sample on. Normally we do it by cystocentesis, which means we use a needle and syringe to go directly into the bladder to get as sterile a sample as possible. Couldn't get any. So I took the dog outside to see if I could get a free catch. She walked around in circles for a few minutes, then decided to climb up a snow pile and sit completely in the snow to urinate. I couldn't get my tray under her to catch it because she was surrounded by snow. Two hours later, we tried again. Cystocentesis failed again. I took her outside, and this time she immediately went and sat in the same snow pile. I failed to catch it again. I was becoming very frustrated with this dog. So another two hours went by. Tried and failed again with the cystocentesis. The owner was here to pick her up, and we still didn't have urine from this dog. So we decided to have the owner walk her outside while I try to catch her urine. Sure enough, she sat in the snow pile again. As soon as she did that, I grabbed her tail and lifted it up, shoved the tray under her, and hoped for the best. Finally, I got the urine sample we needed, along with a large amount of yellow snow. (Don't eat it, kids!) My hand was frozen, but I accomplished my job.

This was probably the longest, craziest, busiest, and most exhausting 6 days of my life. I'm just glad I was able to sleep in this morning and get some much needed rest. Overall, it was a pretty good week. I learned a lot, laughed a lot (mostly because I was almost to the point of sleep deprivation), and I finally got my almost 40 hours for the week. Specifically 39.93. If I had worked another 5 minutes, I would have hit 40. Oh well. But now I don't have to go back until Tuesday, and I'll probably have plenty of other adventures next week.

My crazy week, part 1

So I've been at work for the last 6 days. Not by choice, of course. People called me asking to fill in for them for lame reasons like their car won't start because it's too cold, they just got their wisdom teeth out and they're in a lot of pain, or they've had the flu for a week. But on the bright side, I'm finally getting my 35-40 hours that I'm legally entitled to according to my full time status. Being at work for 6 straight 10+ hour days is pretty exhausting. Things start to get to you.

Day 1: Friday, January 31.
This started off as every other normal day that I didn't have to work. I was sleeping. Then I got a phone call at 7am from a co-worker saying her car wouldn't start. I agreed to come in for her because so far that week I had only worked about 14 hours. I went in at 8, worked til 2. Not bad at all. Overall, not a horrible day.

Day 2: Saturday, February 1.
A regularly scheduled day. One of my longer days, I went in at 7. (Now, for those of you who don't know me well, I'll just tell you now that I am probably the furthest thing from a morning person that exists. My ideal sleeping time is from 3am til noon.) Most of the day went pretty well, nothing too exciting happened, and I left at 7:30pm.

Day 3: Sunday, February 2.
This is the point in my week that starts getting unbearably crazy. I was scheduled for surgery that day, so I got to work at 6:30. Unfortunately, I had to wait for the Petsmart manager to show up to unlock the doors so I could go in. I could have gotten another 10 minutes of sleep. We only had one surgery scheduled, a dog neuter. No big deal, it was looking like a pretty slow day. Then a dog showed up for a dental cleaning. Apparently, somebody forgot to mark in the computer that it was a drop off, so it didn't show up in the section for scheduled surgeries. But I could deal with it, we still only had 2 surgeries. Then the owner of the dog to be neutered decided that he doesn't want to pay $25 for an e-collar (cone of shame) or pain meds to go home, because he thought that everything his dog would ever need was included in the price of our wellness plans for which he pays a monthly fee. I tried to clear things up with him, to no avail. So I told him I would talk to the doctor about it and get things cleared up. This was at 7:15, and the doctor doesn't usually arrive before 8:30. When she got there, I filled her in on what happened, and she called the guy right away. Of course his phone went to voicemail, and they played phone tag for a good half hour trying to come to an understanding about wellness plans, what is covered, etc. Eventually the guy was satisfied, and we could continue with the surgery. We didn't even pre-med the dog until 10:00, and it has to set in for at least 30 minutes before being induced into anesthesia. So we got a late start. (Normally, we already would have been done with the surgery.) So we went into surgery, neutered the dog, recovered him from anesthesia, and started on the dental. This particular dog needed about 5 extractions, but didn't really like staying under anesthesia. She didn't stay stable for very long periods of time, and insisted on waking up as soon as the doctor started extracting teeth. We got one tooth out, and decided this dog shouldn't stay under. So we turned the gas off and woke her up. She was breathing really hard, her heart rate and blood pressure were both high, and her temperature was pretty low, so we had to keep monitoring closely until she stabilized. About 45 minutes later, she calmed down and we were able to move on with our day. That was about 1:30. I still hadn't gone on break, and we had appointments starting at 2:15, and several people had already called to set up walk-ins at 2:00. I got back from lunch at 2:30, and sure enough, we had 3 rooms there. 2 of those were sick pets that would have to be dropped off to do diagnostics. The rest of the day was like this, and I didn't even finish cleaning up my surgery stuff until 5:30. (We close at 5 on Sundays). Thankfully, nothing too exciting happened after the 2:00 hour, but we were still running around like crazy trying to get things done up until 7:00. Then, I finally got to go home.

What's in a name?

We had another euthanasia today. But I promised a couple of my friends that my next post would be happy. So I had to find a different, less-sad topic.

This morning we were all having a conversation about different names that some pets have, and how they can sometimes be ironic. Some examples:
A very aggressive cat named Happy.
A Saint Bernard named Poco (Spanish for little).
A sweet little tabby kitten named Diablo.
A yellow lab named Cocoa.
A dog named Lucky who had been shot twice, was blind in his left eye, and had a chronic case of hookworms. (Then again, I suppose he was lucky to be alive.)
A dog named Teddy who is...let's just say less cuddly than a teddy bear.

And then there are those names that are super predictable, like:
Numerous black and white cats (and dogs) named Oreo.
A pomeranian named Pom Pom.
A black and white tuxedo cat named Tux.
An orange tabby cat named Garfield.
A chihuahua with any sort of Spanish name.
Black labs named Rocky (yes, I have seen more of these than you can imagine.)

And then there are more creative, interesting, and just off-the-wall names:
Tootdahls (pronounced "Toodles")
Amidala Sparkles
Bruno Von Axel
Puffles with Socks
LB (short for Little Bastard)
Moondancer
Snapdragon
Jefferson Starship

Some names are just all too common. The names I probably hear the most often for girl dogs are Bella, Lily, and Lucy; most common for boy dogs are Rocky and Buddy.
At any rate, names are important. Some better than others, but you can usually tell the owner's personality based on their pet's name. Not always, but most of the time. (Once we had a dog named Barbie, I walked into the room and the lady was putting on makeup.) I have seen a lot of good names and a lot of bad names. I've even helped name some puppies and kittens. Honestly, picking out names is one of my favorite parts of being a pet owner. It lets me show some of my creative side. I have a huge list of names for my potential future pets, now I just need pets that fit those names. Someday.