Recently my job has been kind of a drag. I’m employed full time so I shouldn’t complain, but this working five days a week shit is for the…. Well, it kinda sucks because veterinarians DON’T work eight hour days even if they’re scheduled to work eight hour days, and I find most people to be very wearying.
I spent the month of September, as I have every odd numbered month since the beginning of the year, on the swing shift. The 11a.m. to 7p.m. hours aren’t so much the problem, it’s just that the way our schedule works if you’re doing swing shifts you don’t usually do any surgery. Which means that you spend your day seeing appointments. ALL day, EVERY day.
And, as I said, I find most people to be very wearying.

I switched back to day shifts (7a.m. to 3p.m.) as of October 1. And I spent most of my first four days in full bore surgery mode.
This makes Margaret 😀 very 😀 happy.

It’s not just that I enjoy surgery, it’s that if I’m in surgery I don’t have to go into a room with a small wiggly critter (and sometimes small wiggly children), deal with their reaction to me (sometimes good, sometimes not), and deal with their people twice an hour for 6 or 7 hours a day. And I don’t have to restrain myself from doing things like smacking the owners upside the head and asking “WELL DUH! IF YOU HAD BEEN VOMITING AND HAVING DIARRHEA WOULD YOU WANT TO GO OUT FOR A 2 MILE WALK AND THEN PLAY EVEN IF IT WAS NICE OUTSIDE?!”
I need a vacation. I’m not nearly so crabby most of the time.

Anyway, cool surgery stuff.
I managed to score another re-plumbing job on a cat. This one, an adult belonging to a neighbor of the hospital, had obstructed a couple of times and was going to do it again. The surgery was interesting and I am much more confident now of my ability to be able to do the same thing again even than I was after the first time.
That does not, however, mean that the suturing job is any easier. Damn that’s an inconvenient bugger to suture. Especially since everything in the world, in a traitorous attempt to make me feel old, seems to be getting markedly smaller these days. Damned global warming making everything shrink!

The next day I got to remove a bladder stone. Wasn’t nearly as big as the bladder boulder I removed once (I can’t find the photos, maybe they’re at work) which was, no shit, 4 1/2 X 6 1/2 INCHES and weighed nearly two pounds, but it was still a sizable rock. A sizable rock in a small dog. A sizable rock in a small, young dog who had never been completely house trained. Who now has a bladder capacity larger than a teaspoon and may, in fact, be comfortable and completely house trained for the first time since she was a puppy.
Gotta feel good about that.

But the best is yet to come!
Tuesday is my procedures day. Next Tuesday I’ve got seven procedures on my schedule, so seven procedures to complete in eight hours (this is an unusual number by the way, we usually cap the schedule at five).
Four cat neuters and three dental cleanings.
That means I come in to work, I do surgery in a quick, intense burst for about 20 minutes. For the rest of the day I sit, write charts, answer phone calls, and examine teeth as my technician cleans and extracts them.

If I could neuter cats all day…. Well I’d end up with a really odd repetitive stress injury, but boy I’d be the happiest girl in wrist braces.