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.
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