I started full-time at the vet clinic on Friday. I will work 1am to 8am four or five nights a week, usually Thursday through Monday, throughout the summer. I've had to shift my home routines but it seems to be working out okay for me and the animals.
The work careens from intense to absurd to mundane. Emergencies can be emotionally intense but they can also simply present a lot of tough technical challenges for the veterinary care team. For example, I saw a dog come in with bloat that was literally dropping in front of our eyes. We had about 10 minutes to prep him for surgery, a task that can usually take half an hour or more. Absurd, well, a good example is my pee pad experience. We go through a lot of pee pads. They come folded up like accordions. I learned to my dismay that absolutely under no circumstances should you try to snap them open like you were unfolding a towel or opening a trash bag. The other tech walked in two nights ago to find me covered head to toe in pee pad stuffing, surrounded by a veritable drift of the stuff on the floor. She said, you didn't. I said, yep, I did. Don't worry, it won't happen again. And the mundane? There is always something that needs to be cleaned: kennels, floors, walls, laundry, exam rooms, counter tops, equipment.
On a typical shift, I rarely sit down for more than 15 minutes. That's seven hours on my feet, constantly on the move, bending down to lift animals or adjust their IVs, wiping walls, folding laundry, reaching up for drug vials or boxes of syringes for stocking. It is physically and emotionally demanding work.
The back office humor is rather grim and not for special snowflakes. Certainly a lot of that is a coping mechanism, and there is no disrespect to clients or patients. On our flow charts for patient care, one of the items that must occur every hour is "check on me, love me"--if you put your initials in the box, the expectation is that you did just that. But sometimes the absurd and the black humor collide and things get really weird.
An emergency call came in. A petsitter said that a dog had eaten maybe 10 ounces of brownies made with semi-sweet dark chocolate. Not good--chocolate is toxic to dogs. Of course, if the dog ate 10 ounces of brownies, she probably didn't eat 10 ounces of chocolate, but we still calculate toxicity as if she had eaten that much in order to determine the proper treatment. When he arrived, the petsitter told me and the other nurse that the dog may have eaten the brownies in the past seven hours. That was not good--inducing vomiting wouldn't be as effective as a lot of the material would have been digested and heading for her liver by then. The dog was listless and having problems moving. Her temperature was unusually low. We collected the basic data, then called the vet down (he was asleep upstairs). In minutes, he comes back to the treatment room with the dog in tow, announcing "this dog needs a movie and some cheetos." The other nurse and I looked at each other: huh? The vet said, "she's tripping balls." Ohhh.
Pot brownies. The dog was high.
Double whammy because marijuana is also toxic to dogs! If the petsitter hadn't admitted this little fact to one of the three of us, we might not have treated the dog properly. I didn't get a chance to ask the vet why he suspected this, but my guess is that he'd probably seen it before, or maybe the petsitter felt he could admit something to the doctor that he was not willing to tell either of us nurses--which is actually a fairly common thing.
We promptly induced vomiting with an injectable drug (holding her head over strategically arranged pee pads, of course). For starters, way more than 10 ounces of chocolately goodness came out of her. There were large, unchewed chunks that alone would have been close to 10 ounces, discovered as we poked around in the vomit pile with a tongue depressor. And secondly, the brownies must have had some frosting or fudge filling because there was a much darker fudgey goo mixed in. That's why you assume the entire amount consumed was actually all chocolate. Better to err on the high side. Heh.
This was a true emergency requiring prompt action on the parts of both nurses and the vet. Set a catheter, draw blood, run tests, get the numbers to the vet. Prepare the IV fluid line and bag. Draw up some drugs and get those into her. Prepare her admit paperwork. Get a kennel set up, get the IV fluid bag onto the pump, get the pump programmed. A lot of small but individually complex tasks that needed to be done in a certain order and completed without delay.
But. How could one not appreciate the absurdity of this? She was a chocolate lab--oh, my, the material was writing itself. She was high. She vomited up an enormous mound of chocolate goo (take it from me, the combined smell of dog kibble and brownies moistened with gastric juices is not very appetizing). And orange cheeto dust on face and fingers is not a good look for anyone, really. The jokes flew fast and furious even as our three-person team buzzed around (ha, see what I did there?) taking care of her.
Black humor indeed but at no point did I hear judgement or criticism. This is a very interesting job.
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