Current Events - October 2011

I decided to postpone the promised horse blog to do a “current events” blog. It’s been an unusual week around here… pretty memorable.

Monday of this week, I neutered a rat. Yes, a pet rat. It was something I’ve never done before, and wouldn’t have agreed to it except that:

1. A staffer here asked me to do it, and
2. We had a sincere but brief conversation about anesthetic risk with small rodents a few days before I did it (I also made her promise not to tell her daughter about the new pet rat until after the surgery & recovery).

We have the benefit of having a couple of techs on staff that have had some experience dealing with more unusual pets. One of them ran anesthesia for me while I did the surgery as fast as possible to get Dudley awake ASAP. It went off without a hitch, but I have to admit I was sweating bullets the whole time.

On Tuesday, someone “donated” an injured bird to us. As best we can figure, it’s a Rail of some sort- a spindly-legged marsh bird. It was addled at first, and was therefore easy to deal with. As we fed it and it came back to its senses, it began to act like you would expect any wild creature to act: It tried to kill the people working with it. Thank goodness, its abilities in that area are somewhat limited by the fact that it weighs about 2 ounces. Here’s a picture of him before he turned into the avian version of The Incredible Hulk:

After almost a full day of rehab here at the clinic, the bird is destined for a local wildlife rescue group.  I think he’ll enjoy having a new group of folks to thrash.

Finally, we took in some boarders yesterday that are a little out of the norm for us. Here’s a picture of the crew:

I have to say that I think this is fun. I grew up on a poultry farm with tens of thousands of chickens at a time, so eight is a different ballgame entirely. They’ll be with us until next week until their owners get back into town. Until then, I’ll be entertained by the occasional “peep” mixed in with the barking from the kennels.

I’ve talked before about not knowing exactly what you’ll be doing every morning when you go into work as a veterinarian. This week has proven that variety is the spice of life- it’s been a blast.

-RAB