Well Hello, Little Frie....Oh Fucking Fuck

As I was walking to my car yesterday morning to leave for work, I noticed ...something... in my far peripheral vision.

 

 

Yeah. I had passed within a couple of feet from her.

She was a real beauty, as you can see. But I'm afraid I'm not willing to share my property with poisonous snakes, so I had to dispatch her.

I calmly put my bags in the car, and opened the garage door. I went in and put on my knee-high work boots, grabbed a shovel and a hatchet, and did the deed.

I briefly considered taking her body to work to take a look at (I have the PPE, the tools, and a way to properly dispose of her). But then decided that was probably taking things just a wee bit too far.

Tales From The Necropsy Floor: "My eyes! My eyes!"

A couple of weeks ago, on a Monday, I was doing a necropsy of a cow that I had taken in over the weekend. She had been in our cooler for at least 36 hours but had been dead for at least a day or so when we put her in there. That's a long way of saying she was definitely dead and bloated.

When I was reaching across her to remove the muscles and fat of the abdominal wall to expose the abdomen, I accidentally nicked her enormous, gas-distended rumen with my scalpel. The blast of gas and aerosolized rumen liquid shot up my face and right into my eyes.

Uh-oh. 

I had an N95 mask on so my mouth and nose were protected. But not my eyes. I wear glasses but have not yet found safety goggles that don't damage my extremely expensive and utterly necessary eyeglasses. A face shield would have been useless. I stopped to wash my face but the inoculation had already occurred.

Sure enough, 48 hours later, I woke up with red, painful, gunky eyes. This progressed to a piercing headache that I couldn't tamp down with ibuprofen, and quite a bit of pain when I had to move my eyes. 

I finally gave up the following Monday, called in sick to work, and hauled myself to an urgent care clinic. I was diagnosed with conjunctivitis, of course, but also something called epi-scleritis, which meant the muscles and other tissues around my eye were involved too. 

Better living through the standard pharmacopia, however: antibacterial eye ointment (oily, gross) and diclofenac, a stronger NSAID than anything I could get OTC. I even got a steroid shot in my butt at the clinic. I started feeling better in just a few hours. 

While this sort of thing is a fairly typical hazard of my profession, and I was not exposed to anything really nasty, it will certainly change my behavior in the future. For starters, I think I will decompress those rumens first thing!

Tales From The Necropsy Floor

At the lab, we see a colorful array of species and their endlessly variable disease presentations. There is a seasonality to some of our cases--more kittens in the spring, more cows in the fall, more cow abortions in March through May. But that doesn't mean we don't see kittens in winter, cows in summer, and abortions any time of the year. 

Backyard poultry cases always liven up the necropsy floor. They usually have interesting parasites, internal and external. And when it's an older laying hen, it almost always has cancer. Invariably, those older hens come wrapped in scented trash bags. I am not sure exactly why so many backyard bird owners submit their birds wrapped in scented trash bags. Maybe there's an instruction manual that I haven't come across yet. 

My colleague and I divide the week's necropsy cases up between us, mainly so I can get admin work done and be free for meetings and such. And even though I have my days on the floor, and X has his days, we often end up working necropsy cases at the same time. While it can get kind of chaotic for the tech who has to bounce back and forth between us, it's a great opportunity for us to learn from each other. We look over each other's shoulder, poking and prodding and asking questions, and we argue about differentials and diagnostics.In fact, we argue about these things all the time, but when we have the animal remains in front of us, there is an extra dimension to the discussions. To be clear, I don't use "argue" with a combative connotation. It may get heated but it's always professional.

My colleague X and I have radically different styles when doing necropsies, and although we usually arrive at the same list of differentials for any given case, we get there by separate routes. That doesn't mean our conclusions are not sound or supported by gross findings, but it does highlight how many different ways that diseases can present themselves. 

Performing a necropsy requires a systematic approach to ensure that you don't miss anything, and my colleague and I use the same basic approach for all cases. But there are stylistic differences. For the gross pathology component, I tend to lay all tissues out and examine them as a group while he examines each tissue and organ as he goes, but the end result is the same. Swabs get taken and sometimes fresh tissues are set aside for other tests. For the histopathology part, selected tissue samples are placed in formalin. We use formalin as a fixative to firm up tissues so we can cut very thin slices and put them onto microscope slides.

The biggest difference in our styles is how we select tissues for histopathology. I have a very parsimonious style, so, for example, if the spleen is normal, I'll place a small piece of it in the formalin jar and discard the rest. My colleague thinks big. Very big. It's not unusual for him to place entire cat heads (he was interested in one of the eyes) and the complete bodies and all viscera from small chickens in the formalin jar. This has become a bit of a running joke back in the histo lab because when my cases are laid out for trimming, there is a neat little pile of tissues, easy to sort and select. When his cases are laid out for trimming, there are enormous, macabre mounds of organs and appendages.

Yesterday, I picked up a backyard bird case from him in order to even out our case load for this week. But I didn't tell the technician that I was taking the bird. She thought my colleague was doing all three cases that afternoon, and she set out equipment at each station with him in mind. 

The chick was about 4 weeks old, not even as long as my palm. But the technician had a three-liter formalin jar all ready to go. Three liters, nearly a gallon of formalin, for tissues from an animal that didn't even weigh 50 g. As I tossed my tiny little pile of tissue samples into this massive jar, I glanced over at my colleague who was working nearby on a cat and I loudly said to the technician, "Well, it's obvious that you expected X to be doing this necropsy instead of me!" He looked up, blinked a couple of times over his mask, and all three of us cracked up.

I am grateful that I work with a colleague like X who can take a bit of good-natured teasing and not alter his style one tiny bit.