CircusK9: File Under "Never A Dull Moment"

Hijinks and hilarity are the rule, not the exception, at CircusK9. I have two stories to illustrate and amuse. 

The first story is about Archie. He loves to play--he plays with the cat, with Azza, with his toys, with me. When I am studying, he brings me toys one by one, hoping that maybe this one will entice me to play since the one he brought me five minutes earlier did not. I've written before about looking up from my books and notes and computer to find myself surrounded by a sea of dog toys, so many that I have to move them out of the way to move my chair. 

Often when he is super stimulated during toy play, he carries his toys into Azza's or Mimi's crate, or to the two dog beds by my study area. He proceeds to ruck up the bedding, vigorously pulling it up and back with his front paws, with the general aim of burying his treasure within. He can completely turn over all of the bedding in the process, and in the case of the dog beds, move them several feet across the room. He will also bury his antlers like this. So every morning, while the dogs are eating breakfast, I go around to all the crates and dog beds to straighten out the bedding and remove all of Archie's stashed toys and antlers. 

The other morning while I was straightening up the dog things, I was completely taken aback to find this:

That is a picture of an antler and a plush toy carefully placed on the cat's scratching box. In case you are thinking, "pfft, carefully placed--that was just an accident", I will tell you that I removed them and a different antler and two different toys were on the scratching box the next morning. Archie deliberately stashed his treasure there.

There are several levels of silliness here. I have no idea why Archie gets so much pleasure out of burying his toys--he never retrieves them so I think it is the act of moving everything around that he likes. He never puts toys in his own crate. The terriers regularly take snoozes in any available crate or bed, but they absolutely know which crate is theirs. While the cat doesn't use a crate, Archie sees him use the scratch box every day. I can only assume that Archie logically translated this as "cat's special place, good for stashing treasure." Makes perfect sense.

The second story is about Archie and the cat. I don't free-feed Beast--every meal is measured out. Thus he is convinced that he will starve and blow away like a bit of fluff, and he is constantly, and loudly, on the lookout for things he can eat. The compost bucket is a regular stop on his rounds although I've learned to put the lid on it when I put things like eggshells in there. He will come to the kitchen and beg just like the dogs when I am preparing dinner, although I have a low tolerance for that behavior and chase them all out after a few minutes. 

Last night, I carved out an hour to make some real food. I sliced up half a sweet onion, peeled and cubed an eggplant, and cleaned, trimmed, and cut up three chicken thighs into thumb-sized chunks (when you are in vet school, you learn that when you manage to find time to cook, you cook big, enough for several meals, because you don't know when you'll have time again). I put all of that deliciousness into a saucepan with olive oil, salt, black pepper, and basil, gave it a bit of a stir, and turned on the burner. Suddenly, and now I can't even remember exactly why, I had to run back to the bedroom for something. It seemed necessary at the time. I was only gone for a few seconds. 

I returned to the kitchen just in time to see the cat leaping off the stove with a piece of raw chicken dangling from his mouth. A piece of raw chicken he pulled directly from the heating saucepan. Little fucker. Archie was waiting below, jaws open like a crocodile--he is a very alert terrier and knows when the cat is up to something. The cat leaped over his head, hit the floor, and the chase was on. The cat was so frantic to take his treasure into the bedroom and under the bed, and Archie was so equally frantic to take the raw chicken from the cat's mouth, that they were bouncing off each other, off walls, off corners, off furniture, like pinballs. Archie was growling, the cat was growling, I was laughing so hard I could barely stand up. 

I grabbed a flashlight, ran to the bedroom (yo, a nod to earthquake preparedness here, I have flashlights stashed all over the place), and dropped to the floor to watch it all play out. I sleep on a platform bed so Archie was not as maneuverable in that low space as the cat was but he sure gave it his all. In the end, the cat managed to choke down the piece of raw chicken before Archie could take it from him. Archie had to console himself with licking up drool and juice from the floor.

Never, ever a dull moment.

Diary of a Third-Year Vet Student: Back in the Saddle Again

Our pony, Thomas O'Malley, is shaping up nicely. He had a bath last Monday and is getting groomed daily. Nobody on my team is all that expert at daily horse care but we make an attempt at keeping him brushed. I've been trying different grooming tools on him. He seems to like a regular plastic hairbrush with knobs on the bristles the best. I can gently brush his face and forelock and he closes his eyes in what I think is pleasure.

My Large Animal Surgery team castrated Thomas on Wednesday. We do three big surgeries this term and each team got to decide who would be surgeon, assistant, and anesthesiologist for each one. I intentionally negotiated with my team members to do anesthesia for this first (and only) surgery on our ponies.

I had a really terrible experience at anesthesia for the third dog spay that my Small Animal Surgery team did last term. The dog survived, but she did all she could to make things difficult. She needed glycopyrrolate twice during surgery to get her heart rate up, she needed more injected pain meds (morphine) during the surgery (she had already received 3x what we had planned before that point), and most of my monitoring devices stopped working or weren't working. I only had a device to measure the oxygenation of her blood and her heart rate, and a crappy little inline device that we added during the procedure to measure how much CO2 she was blowing off. And that's basically it. I was manually breathing for her by squeezing the rebreathing bag 4 to 6 times a minute, every 10 to 15 seconds or so. I had to do that for 1 hour and 45 minutes. ONE HOUR AND 45 MINUTES. I'll leave it to you to figure out how many times I squeezed that bag, but it was a horror show. I stared at the clock for my mark then watched the manometer to make sure I didn't squeeze too hard (easy to do) then turned back to the clock. I was hardly breathing myself. I stopped just twice during that period to manually measure her blood pressure using a cuff and a squeeze bulb--inaccurate but it was the best I could do under those time constraints. She was hyperventilating so she was not inhaling as much inhalant anesthetic as she needed and I had to keep adjusting the rate of flow of that drug. Her belly was rapidly moving up and down for most of the entire procedure from the hyperventilation, making it very difficult for my teammate to place the three layers of suture required.

But she survived, and recovered smoothly and quickly despite being pumped full of all kinds of drugs. And I learned a lot about physiology and anesthesia in one afternoon. A crash course, really. Even so, I felt pretty traumatized by it and I didn't want that experience to hold me back when it was my turn to run anesthesia for my Large Animal teammates. So I decided I needed to tackle the anesthesia role as soon as possible--get right back into the saddle.

No matter what the procedure, the student anesthesiologist has to give peri-op antibiotics, pre-op analgesics, and pre-sedating drugs so we can place the IV catheter. Then we induce with more drugs, intubate, give more induction drugs because we tend to err on the low side, and get the patient hooked up to O2, inhalant anesthetic, and what seems like thousands of monitoring wires and leads. The drugs and doses vary with species but the basic tasks are more or less the same. I did all of those things for our pony without too much trouble or reference to my notes. And when all of the other ponies became hypotensive (blood pressure too low) and had to be put on special IV drips to address that, our pony's blood pressure remained nearly normal, as in waking and walking around normal. His heart rate--same thing. He was absolutely sedated, but he was just not having any problems with it! The only bit of trouble was that he wanted to stop breathing every so often. His average respiration was about 5 to 8 breaths per minute but they weren't evenly spaced and I sometimes had to remind him to breathe by manually giving him a breath. But given that I had spent most of the dog spay doing just that, I had no problem with it.

Besides the castration, which was basically more like a giant dog neuter than a pony castration, we did some additional procedures including hoof care. I had to continue to monitor anesthesia during that as well as help my team.

I am really pleased with how well it all came out. I felt like I had a much better idea of the balance between the drugs and what I was observing and monitoring. Rather than squawk out a panicked "help!", I was instead calmly calling over the clinician or resident and saying, "I see this combination of physical parameters that look great, holding steady for an hour, but this other parameter is trending a little off. I don't believe it is a problem but I wanted to verify that." Such a huge difference between panic and validation of my interpretation of the situation. I am so very glad that I chose to repeat the anesthesia experience right away. It wasn't a perfect walk in the park--I made a couple of rookie but correctable mistakes. I learned from those too. All of my classmates are taking similar tiny steps towards becoming a veterinarian.

Diary of a Third-Year Vet Student: Worms, Eyeballs, and Feral Ponies

Last term was all about the small animal surgery lab: dog and cat spays and neuters. This term will be all about the large animal surgery lab.

For this lab course, we are again working in teams of three or four. Different teams, though. This time we were teamed up based on our relative experience with horses. Each team has been assigned a miniature horse. Over the next 7 weeks, we will perform a variety of diagnostic procedures on the ponies (after labs in which we practice first on cadavers), and we will castrate the ponies in a couple of weeks.

The ponies are feral. Entirely feral, never been handled. Some are quite young (my team's pony is at most six months old), some are several years old. Feral mini ponies are little ninjas, and can strike you with front or rear hooves as they choose. They can also bite. However, we've been pretty lucky this year. Most of the ponies are so shocked at being yanked from a cold, muddy pasture somewhere in Oregon and placed in dry, warm pens with abundant food that they only put up token resistance to being haltered for the first time and being handled and dragged about for the first lab.

The ponies are owned by one individual who is making them available to the vet school for the use of the junior surgery lab. So far, they have been weighed, dewormed, vaccinated for tetanus, and had a physical exam and basic blood work done. Some arrived with conditions that required immediate treatment. About half of them are underweight and the students have to come in twice a day and give them additional rations. Because they are technically patients of the vet hospital, I can't post any pictures of them as that would violate client and patient privacy. But I can post this cool picture of a worm that we found on the floor of our pony's pen this afternoon (horses are social animals so the ponies are penned in groups of four; no telling which one passed it). Better living through deworming, right?

Strongylus vulgaris, a common intestinal worm in horses.

One of my classmates spotted the worm so I made her collect it in an exam glove that I had in my pocket. Everyone was excited and wanted to look at it. I eventually set it up on a paper towel in the female student's locker room so people could get pictures.

In case you hadn't noticed, by this point in our education, vet students are completely unacceptable to be let out into the general population.

Another example. We had an ophthomology lab today. We did some basic procedures on mares from the vet school's teaching herd but we practiced the more invasive procedures on heads from horse cadavers. Just the heads, sitting out on lab tables. The heads were used first by half of the class yesterday so by the time of our lab today, the eyeballs were not in great condition. So the first thing we did was pump a bunch of saline in to them to practice a particular type of injection, which had the beneficial effect of plumping them back up again.

We all openly acknowledge that we have crossed a sort of Rubicon. When non-vet people ask us what we are studying in class, we shrug and say, oh, you know, dogs and cats and horses and things. What we really want to say is, worms, eyeballs, and how to find barely descended testicles in young feral ponies.

Archie and His Tennis Balls, Continued

It's hard not to compare Archie to Harry: male, black and white smooth fox terriers, sweet and loving and astonishingly stubborn. And both utterly obsessed with tennis balls. That's not particularly fair to Archie--he is very much his own personality. But the overlap between them is surprising.

I had to keep all tennis balls picked up when Harry was around because he would guard them rather fiercely. Mine! All mine! I was able to channel his energy into a great career in flyball, but that only fed his obsession with tennis balls. I have no doubt that Archie would also do well in flyball, sailing over the start/finish line shaking his head and growling with the ball in his mouth as he passed the dog coming in, just as Harry did. Mine! But I prefer to keep Archie focused on agility for now.

Even though Archie is not particularly guardy for a fox terrier, I still have to keep tennis balls picked up. Otherwise, he would either bury me in a mound of them while I was studying (he picks the balls up and drops them inches from me, letting them bounce a few times, then repeats this...endlessly) or he would chew on one constantly like a large yellow cud. That's not great for his teeth.

I can't even say "ball" around him--he starts flinging himself around the house with the same energy as if I had said "agility" or "walk". His pupils dilate, his ears come forward. He drools a little. He runs to one of the spots where I store the balls, looking back at me expectantly.

I think there are around 20 or 25 tennis balls in the house. I'm not actually sure of the total count because even though I am vigilant about looking under furniture for them when I clean and picking them up after we play, Archie somehow manages to produce 1 or 2 a week. I have absolutely no idea where he stores them. In fact, I have decided that he makes them. I think Archie has a laboratory somewhere in the house where he conducts his alchemy: turning lead into tennis balls. Retorts bubbling away, flasks of stinky, gem-colored liquids, mortars filled with ashes of newt. 

I have a dog bed in the bathroom because I gave up years ago on peeing and showering alone. Mimi sticks to me like a burr and 99 times out of 100 she will curl up in that bed long before Archie shows up to see what's going on. The other morning, I got out of the shower to find Mimi standing there glaring at Archie who was tightly curled up in the dog bed. Hmm, that's odd, I thought. It wasn't until I finished my routine and was leaving that I found out why he was in the bed--he was curled up on top of TWO tennis balls. Two. Did he lay them like eggs? Did he bring them in from his secret laboratory in anticipation of napping on them during my shower? It is a complete mystery.