Hot Mess Minimalist

These days you can find everything on the internet. You can find an old friend on myspace, or facebook, or any other number of websites. You can find businesses in your area, you can find recipes from your favorite chefs... anything you want is within reach a long as you have a keyboard and an internet connection. The other thing that you will find with the vast majority of these things is criticism. Whether it is your favorite teacher or professor being slammed by a student who got a bad grade, or your favorite restaurant given a poor review because of one wilted salad, it can sometimes be aggravating to see these harsh critiques from someone who likely only had one poor experience. Where I work, we have had it emphasized that we need to give 100% to all of our clients. In other words one bad review, whether the client never says a word to any of us, or calls our office manager the next day, or writes a scathing review on the internet gets rather blown out of proportion. I unde...

Sorry it's rather late... but here are my other two stories. Two dogs came in having eaten some blood pressure medication of the owners. Again the task was to make them vomit. This wasn't too difficult. I put them back inside after they had, and put on gloves to poke through what they had eaten. One (a little labrador, and the suspected culprit) had appeared to have vomited newspaper, the other (an older cocker) vomited some bizarre plastic shreds and something orange. The doctor went and spoke to the owners and explained what we had found, and they insisted that the pills were purple. So we kept the dogs for monitoring, and fed them activated charcoal just in case. Before we left for the day I gave them a bowl of water. The little lab drank the whole bowl, and then vomited all of the charcoal I had fed her. Darn. The next day we have a client come in with a dog who was vomiting daily, pretty much in the mornings. The dog had recently come in for a urinary tract infec...

I've been told my blog is amusing. I am going to try to post more frequently regarding work antics. I don't know how successful I will be. But here are three stories (to make up for my lack of blogging) involving oops' and animals. Two dogs came into the clinic and were boarding with us, and happened to have tapeworms. The doctor handed me three and a half pills of de-wormer, two for the larger dog and one and a half for the smaller dog. I took the pills and hid them in some tasty soft food. I got up to the cage, and normally I just sort of hand both the dogs their treats, but this time they both looked rather eager (and I don't like being bit by an overly excited dog) so I dropped both treats right in the front of the cage. In a flash the larger dog had tipped his head toward where the other dog's treat had fallen. I didn't see him eat it but both treats were gone in under half a second. Crap. So I go let my doctor know that I'm dumb. She tells me that I sh...

Today I was working in reception and one of the male kennel staff came up and took an animal back. A bit later as I was checking a client in I herd him yell " Aaaargh !" This guy doesn't say a word if he's stabbed by a needle or scratched so I turned. I was trying to continue helping the client because I figured someone else was helping my friend. Then I hear this scurrying up the hallway towards me, I turned and saw something that looked like a squirrel coming toward the waiting room (and me). There were a number of dogs in the waiting room, and I just acted on instinct and bent down and got a hand on the little critter. It was a kitty. The owner had told us that this cat and it's companion were outdoor kitties, but she didn't say they were feral. She scratched my hand and tried to bite my other hand when I brought it near to pick the little one up. I had my hand in just the right place though on her back that she didn't seem to mind, or mayb...

Something happened at work just now and rather than waiting, and eventually not even posting I decided that I would go home and post what I was thinking immediately. I learned to intubate today. Animals, not people of course. Although I am sure that I learned in a very different way than my medical school friend did. I came in and one of the dogs was not doing well, he was having very labored breathing and seemed to be in a lot of pain, he had liquid stool that smelled very distinctly (and horribly.) I called the doctor on call, then left the room to take care of another animal. When I came back one of the other staff mentioned to me that the dog wasn't moving. I ran the dog to surgery to put it on oxygen, and after standing there for a bit I thought it would be a good idea to push on the dog's chest to get air flowing through his lungs. I knew the dog wasn't breathing, and wasn't sure if I felt a heartbeat. When the doctor got there they said it was dead alread...

I am a bad vet tech. I just ate a burger, and my cat was bugging me so I threw the wrapper. He's what I call an invincible animal though. If you don't know what I mean, or If you just want to hear an interesting story here is one. The Prologue is the story. Yesterday wasn't bad. Actually lately most days haven't been bad, I suppose I have just been building up my story repitore. I've been reading friends blogs about learning to intubate (people) and other cool things people are doing. I figured I would give everyone a little piece of my life lately. At the end of the day yesterday we had a lot come in. One case that I helped with was a cat. This poor cat was not doing well, he actually was brought in inside a recycling bin. The cat had a history of being bad, and biting even people he was familiar with, so I put on the cat gloves and took her out of her box. She was so sick even though she meowed she didn't even try to fight. The cat had begun to bec...

Yesterday was kinda insane in part because of this... http://www.menufoods.com/recall/ If you have a pet you may have already seen this. But there are so many foods on this list that it is worth another look. We have seen a handful of cases since the recall announcement, andunfortunately we still don't know exactly what is in the food or how it got there. The food affected has been sold beginning in December, so even if you haven't bought food recently please check these lists. We have several suspected cases earlier in the year, that we are now thinking may be connected to whatever went wrong with the food. Look for your pets behaving differently, being lethargic, not eating, vomiting, drinking and peeing a lot. This whole thing brought up a lot of interesting hypothetical questions for me. Like what would happen if this did affect almost all pets, and in fact killed all animals being fed produced pet food. Would I be out of the job? Would all of the strayssuddenly find homes...

At some point in the last few days I heard someone say these words. I don't know what is is lately but we have been getting a lot of life or death type emergergencies. At one point we had one two animals in the back being worked on by doctors, then another animal brought in dead, another three in isolation for monitoring, and this can happen occasionally but in this situation every single one of these animals was not just something normal like vomiting. Every one was a traumatic situation. The most interesting of all of these is an animal who's nose won't stop bleeding. There were a few things that could have contributed to it, like a fight, or maybe having a run in with some of the construction near the animal's home, or some dental trauma. But several days later we are still having trouble with it. Very strange.

I was looking forward to applying to graduate school for a Masters in Teaching Physics offered at the local University. When I read that description of the degree on their website it seemed to me that I could apply for the program. Their prerequisites include the normal things, like a high enough GPA, a bachelors degree, and decent GRE's. It also says that an undergraduate degree in physics is not necessary to be accepted. It also says: Undergraduate prerequisites for the program are: 1. Introductory Physics (three semesters). 2. Introductory Chemistry (one year). It goes on to say on the application page (which also refers to students applying for a Masters or PhD in Physics) that they recommend taking the subject GRE. So because I had already been thinking of calling to ask if I should take a semester of Chemistry before applying, I went ahead to and called to ask about the GRE also. I was somewhat convinced that just studying on my own I could somehow study enough to pa...