Last time I managed to avoid having to vaccinate any cats. Perhaps you didn't know but cats are aliens. Their physiology is more or less mammalian but that is just a clever ploy by their leaders and scientists to fool us into thinking that cats are like us. Lots of vets and vet techs will just nod knowingly when the subject of weird cat diseases comes up. Vaccinating them is no exception. They typically get three vaccines: rabies, feline leukemia, and a combo shot with all sorts of things in it. While rare, it is not unusual for cats to develop sarcomas at vax injection sites. Rapidly growing, invasive, lethal sarcomas. For this reason, cats should receive their shots low on their limbs. A sarcoma on their neck, they are dead. A sarcoma on their rear leg, they will live a full life as a three-legged cat. The shots are given in specific limbs so that if problems develop, everyone will know which vaccination it was.
I studied up on cat vaccinations last night and again this morning before the clinic got started. I also took a Sharpie and put a little coded cheat sheet on my arm:
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| rabies, right hind leg (RH); feline leukemia, left hind leg (LH), combo, right front leg (RF) |
Dogs also get their shots in standardized locations but that is more for convenience and communication and to prevent screw-ups such as double injections, etc: rabies in the right shoulder (Rabies, Right), and distemper/parvo in the left shoulder.
A woman who is training to become a CVT and I each took a room. We handled clients who needed to see the vet about something in addition to basic vaccinations and flea treatment and nail trims. We worked very well together. She would have the vet in with a client while I was finishing up with another, cleaning my room, then getting a new patient set up. We kept the doc hopping! Two OSU vet school students took the third room and handled clients who only needed routine care that didn't require the doctor's time or eyeballs.
I was right: my luck did not hold. My partner was unwilling to inject cats but she was quite willing to hold them. As a result, I vaccinated around 10 cats today. That's a lot in one day. I wasn't perfect, of course not. Three times, I managed to push the needle entirely through the little fold of skin I had lifted up, squirting the medicine all over the table. One cat was so furious at the entire scene that I was forced to inject him intramuscularly in his two rear jabs. He was wrapped up in a towel like a burrito and there was no way I could get any loose skin. Easier to just feel for the muscle and poke him that way.
"Measure twice, cut once." I checked my arm before every single shot to make sure I was going to poke each cat in the right place.
We of course had some interesting clients. One woman was tweaking so hard on meth that she was compulsively clenching and grabbing at her cat, making it nearly impossible for us to work on him. She wasn't a threat to us, just difficult to deal with. And another guy, upon finding out that I didn't live in Eugene, almost started crying. "You come all the way here just to help us?" he said.
And that's the message for today, besides hoping that I didn't break any cats by vaccinating them incorrectly. There was a time when I was in a really bad place. My friends helped me out--I will be eternally grateful to them for it. I'm lucky that I can now pass some of that on by helping someone else. I have learned, am learning, skills that can help other people and their pets. That doesn't make me special. But it seems like it is the right thing to do.
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