Language Barrier

photo courtesy of thejetsetpets.com

“The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.”

 -George Bernard Shaw

“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

 -Oscar Wilde

One summer, my wife’s college internship took us to Atlanta for a few months.  I was between my first and second years of vet school and got lucky enough to find a job in a clinic north of the city.

I was at an awkward stage- just educated enough to be dangerous.  Fortunately, the two doctors at the practice, Dr. H and Dr. M, were very patient with me.  While I was assisting with surgery or cleaning teeth or running labwork, they put up with me picking their brains.  Both of them were absolutely brilliant at interpreting diagnostic testing (bloodwork, etc.) and took the time to explain things to me.

I wasn't the only person to benefit from their tutelage.  Another veterinary student had a summer job there as well- Her name was Barb, and she was a third year student in the U.K.  As I recall it, she was from outside London, and was going to graduate school at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

She flew into the States on July 4^th, which I thought was ironic.  In a rare display of restraint, I decided not to wish her a happy Independence Day.

Barb was likable and quick-witted, but I had trouble understanding her speech. There were three reasons for this:

1. Brits use a very different vocabulary.  It’s not a bus, it’s a lorry.  He’s not an alcoholic, he’s a bumper.  It’s not a bathroom, it’s a loo.  Several times a day, we would have to try to figure out what the other person was trying to communicate.  Common language?  Hardly.
2. Pronunciation.  Something as simple as asking for iodine became a head-scratcher when the other person pronounced it “E-oh-deeen”.  
3. She had a habit of speaking very quickly when excited.  When you compound this with the other issues, hilarity and frustration ensue in equal measure.

We worked together pretty closely for a few weeks.  We would compare what we had learned so far in classes and our differing experiences in clinics up to this point.  One day, I asked her where her education was taking her when she returned to the U.K.

“I’m going on holiday, and then I am bound for abattoir.”

I went into translation mode.  Holiday equals vacation.  Got that one.  “Abattoir” was a different story. I took two years of French, and the pronunciation was French…

“Is that in France?”  I asked the internationally-traveling vet student.

Barb looked at me as if I was from Mars. That (as well as the immediate snicker from Dr. M) told me that I was off base. She composed herself and explained to me that abattoir is another term for slaughterhouse.  Veterinarians in the US and U.K spend time in slaughterhouses/abattoirs as part of the food safety training we receive.  My bruised ego and I realized that we would be scoring no points for the Red, White, and Blue that day.

The only real revenge I got was when she had a day off and decided to go sightseeing in Georgia. She wanted to see Stone Mountain and find some trails to hike.  Not being familiar with the native animals, she asked the logical question… do we have any animals she should look out for on her hike?

Me: “Well, we have bees, wasps, and hornets.”

Her: “Okay.”

Me: “… and a couple of venomous spiders- the black widow and brown recluse…”
 

Mild concern started to appear on her face. “Right-O. I’ll just stay away from spiders, then.”

Me: “Oh! We also have three types of venomous snakes, with a few subspecies.”

Genuine alarm now.  Her eyebrows were rising higher with every word.
 

I continued: “There’s the rattlesnake, copperhead, and the water moccasin. I almost forgot- we have scorpions as well, but they’re not as bad as the snakes. You might see a black bear if you go far enough North, too, but that would be unusual.”

I don’t know what pushed her over the edge- the snakes, the scorpions, or the bears.  The expression on her face told me that she was seriously reconsidering her plans to see nature in the New World.

“How do you people even live here?! Everything here wants to kill you!” she shouted.  We both laughed.  I thought of it as a victory for the local creatures. In my mind, Georgia black bears were having The Second Tea Party in Lake Lanier.

One afternoon during her final week in the States, I looked from the back of the clinic to see Barb do a double take over something she was seeing out the front window.  Her mouth dropped open.

“What’s going on, Barb?

“Therearetwoyouthsontheroad, withacatinapram!”

“What?”

“Therearetwoyouthsontheroad, withacatinapram!”

I couldn't make it out. I went up front to see what was going on.  On the 4-lane highway out front were a young man and woman pushing a baby buggy down the roadside.  From inside the buggy, a cat’s head slowly rose up and looked around like a periscope on a submarine.  They turned into the clinic driveway, and I watched as the cat’s head sank slowly down again.

Now I understood. “There are two youths on the road, with a cat in a pram.” She was trying to tell me that there were some kids on the highway with a cat in a baby buggy.

I don’t know why she didn't just use plain English.

Things you learn at funerals

 

 photo courtesy of probioticsmart.com

Odenville, Alabama is a small town. We get to know a lot of people really well- we see their kids at basketball practice, we run into them in restaurants, we know when they are sick, and we know when they pass away. I usually attend a few funerals a year for clients that have passed on. A few weeks ago, I attended a funeral for a man who had been a client for seven years.  

 
In some sense, it was exactly what you would expect- friends and family in small circles around the room, talking in quiet voices. People were signing the guest book and sitting to watch the slide show being projected in the front of the room in a loop. What caught my attention was the number of pictures devoted to his little black and white dog, a constant companion through a long illness.

The dog had come to him as a puppy in 2009. The dog’s name is Little Man, and his personality is… complex. I won’t go into any details other than to say that his medical record has a warning that says the following:

 

WATCH OUT HE WILL EAT YOU!!!!!

 At the funeral, I met several fellow victims of Little Man. One even showed me where she had still-healing bite marks on her arm. I heard stories about him guarding the sick bed and not allowing the Hospice nurses to get close to his owner. All of the stories I heard were delivered with a smile, and there was a reason for that.  

 

The reason was summed up in a picture hanging in the front of the room. When I saw it, I stared at it for a little bit and realized how important Little Man was. The picture was taken not too long before my client passed away.

 

He was sitting on the edge of his bed. Disease had clearly taken its toll on him, the way that cancer always does in the end. In his arms, he was holding Little Man out toward the camera. It was like he wanted to have a picture made of just Little Man, to remember him that way. I won’t forget that picture- it seemed to sum up everything about the relationship that the two of them had.

 

I don’t think of Little Man in the same way anymore. Not after seeing how important he was, attitude and all, to the man who wanted him as a companion during his remaining time here on Earth.

 

Our Chicken Adventure

Earlier this year, we wrote about the Bean family’s first attempt at raising backyard chickens.  We are happy to say that all 13 chickens that we brought home are alive and well.  We are not happy to say that we are still eggless at this point.

Our plan to have pets who lay eggs has fizzled into a plan where we keep 13 freeloaders who eat (a lot!) and require their area to be cleaned frequently.  Please don’t get us wrong… we enjoy the chickens.  They can be comical and sweet.    Brownie, the smallest hen, sits on our shoulders and peeps at us.  If offered the chance, she will fly up and rest on an extended arm like a falcon.  Rhody, the rooster, fusses for a good 5 minutes when we put him up for the night.  He seems to think he is an outdoorsman and wants to sleep under the stars (bet that will change with the weather!).  Hershey, our barred bird, seems to be at the top of the pecking order even though the white hens are a good pound heavier.  (We are afraid that Hershey may be a rooster… it’s a little early to tell).  The white hens who make up the rest of the flock all look the same.  Since we can't tell them apart, we have named them all Sheila.  While they seem nice enough, the only real personality trait that they display is hunger.

Anyhow, the chickens are alive and well… just highly unproductive…

Having a Dad that's a Doctor

We have a guest blogger- Dr. Bean's son!  He volunteered to write this blog during one of the mornings he spent at the clinic.

Having a Dad that's a Doctor-

It isn’t easy having a doctor as a dad.  I don’t get to do all the things I want to do when he is on call, like play Magic the Gathering on Saturday night or go fishing Sunday afternoon.  But I do get to see cool animals like baby chicks, chickens, deer, cats, dogs, goats, and rabbits.  And because he’s a doctor, I am going to have a little farm with the baby chicks and a full grown chicken named Rhody.  And I have chores to do at the clinic like opening boxes, unfolding newspapers for cages, and doing laundry.  It isn’t easy, but having a doctor for a dad is exciting.

How We Spent Our Summer Vacation

Our son is always coming up with a scheme to make money or start a new business.  He dreams of becoming a farmer so the money-making ideas usually have an agricultural bent.  After a recent trip to his grandparents’ house and surveying their cattle herd, he decided that he really needed to invest in a calf to raise for beef.  He had grand plans for keeping this calf in our yard…  which is not large, and is in the middle of a heavily wooded subdivision.  Our neighbors currently tolerate the toys and bikes that litter our yard- a calf (and soon to be cow!) would probably not endear us to them.

 

We want to encourage our son in his path to be a farmer and businessman so we have reached a compromise- and embarked on a new adventure.  We are currently building a chicken coop to raise hens (no roosters!) in the backyard.  Our hope is that we will soon have four to six egg-laying pets that will teach responsibility and animal care.  Now- this is not just any chicken coop.  Because we don’t want to limit the building’s purposes or the size of our potential flock, we are building an 8’x8’ coop.  It will be the Taj Mahal of coops- we hope the girls will appreciate it.

 

Providence has also intervened and brought us the first potential member of the feathered family.  This young chicken needed a new home and some healing after a run-in with a dog.  She’s a sweet girl and may be destined for the Bean Chicken Ranch.

 

We’ll bring you more pictures and updates as we progress…  Cross your fingers for us!

How to disgust clients and horrify people

New puppy visits make my day.

I usually get to check out a playful little creature that wants nothing more than my full attention for a few minutes. When I’m doing the physical exam, I rarely find any serious problems.  I get to talk to clients in the lighthearted way I do when things are going smoothly- I can relax, because I don’t have to give anyone bad news.

One day recently, I was doing one of those appointments. I had never met the client before, and was very conscious of the first impression I was making. The Ewok-looking puppy on the table had done its best to lick me to death and was very happy to hang out in the technician’s arms while the owner and I talked.  We discussed the vaccines and dewormer I had just given the new addition to the family.

“Oh yeah, I saw a couple of worms earlier this week. They were really long. What were they?”  the client asked.

Uh-oh.

“Those were probably roundworms. They’re very common in puppies, and the dewormer that we gave will kill them. You’ll probably see more tonight, and that’s OK.  If you will, please get your kids to wash their hands especially well for a few days until the dewormer has time to kill them all.”  I replied.

The look on her face had changed instantly from cheerfulness to concern. “Why? Can my kids get them?”

“Well, yes they can, but deworming and good hand washing are the best ways to make sure that it doesn’t happen.  It’s not common in healthy children and people with normal immune systems, but it never hurts to be cautious.” I was trying to hard to keep the mood light. I was about to fail, and I didn’t know it.

“What happens? What should I look for?”

I sat down in one of the exam room chairs. I had to find a way to give necessary information to the client while not sending her into a full panic.

“Well, a few things can happen, but one of them is that they migrate into a child’s eyeball and cause blindness.” That statement had the effect I was afraid it would. The woman’s jaw was slightly open in an expression of disbelief.  This was not what she expected to hear… her puppy, the epitome of cuteness, was harboring eyeball destroying monsters. And it slept in the bed with her children. So much for the light mood.

At this point, I figured I had nothing to lose, so I just told the client what I was thinking.

“You and I just met, and I hate having conversations like that with people that don’t know me very well. The problem is that if I don’t have those conversations, I’m just not doing my job- and I haven’t done either of us any favors.”

Thankfully, she understood that I wasn’t trying to scare her or exaggerate things, but she had asked me a direct question and expected a direct answer.  I just felt awkward having to give it to her.

I try not to frighten people, especially on their first visit with us. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work out that way.  Maybe, just maybe, I didn’t scare her away and I’ll get to see her and her Ewok again.

The Weirdest Case: One Sick Puppy

We have a guest blogger!  Dr. Jordan Towns wrote this piece about one of the stranger cases that we've seen in a long time.  This case has a happy ending and we've been delighted to see the patient for something as mundane as puppy shots and boarding since his first troubles.

a happy & healthy Max

It had been a fairly uneventful night on call when one of the weirdest cases I had ever seen fell into my lap.  The ring of the emergency phone startled me from the mundane task of checking e-mail.  I listened to the list of odd behaviors and symptoms, and promptly called the concerned owners back.  The patient was a young Labrador puppy named Max.  Until that night, Max had been the typical Lab puppy: energetic, loving, and happy, with a bottomless appetite.  However, when the family had returned from work that afternoon, Max was not acting at all like himself.   He was lying around looking uncomfortable, and he hadn’t eaten at all that day.  Something was definitely wrong.

When I met Max’s worried parents at the clinic, I immediately noticed that Max was a very sick puppy.   He tensed when I touched his abdomen, indicating to me that his abdomen was very painful.  Luckily – or so I thought – there is a relatively short list of problems that are likely to cause a sudden onset of a bad belly-ache in a puppy.

Usually a puppy with a sudden belly-ache has either swallowed an object (like a toy), eaten something that didn’t agree with them, or developed a condition called an “intussusception”.  Intussusception was likely; it’s a condition where a portion of the intestine actually telescopes inside another portion of intestine.

The bad news about these potential diagnoses is that they usually require surgery.  However, the good news is that surgery can provide a cure.   The exam and x-rays pointed to an obstruction or intussusception; it was soon clear that surgery was the only way we could pinpoint Max’s problem and fix it.

Max’s parents readily agreed to the surgery, so it was now time for action.  Max was very sick, so he would need a skilled anesthetist to monitor his condition throughout the surgery – this is where Jana, our on-call technician, was ready to help.  There was also a good chance that two people were needed to complete portions of the surgery, and Dr. Bean was happy to come in and assist me with this.   Max was prepped for surgery, and our search for Max’s problem began. 

Soon into the surgery, we noticed that Max’s bladder was enormous - and unhealthy.  It appeared that Max had been unable to urinate, causing his bladder to fill and stretch until it was causing the symptoms that his owners had noticed this afternoon.

This was not what I expected at all.  In fact, this problem is considered extremely rare in a young puppy.  This was certainly not on my radar!

Something had blocked Max’s ability to urinate… and we needed to find out what.  After we removed the urine from the bladder, we noticed many white crystals floating in the urine.  At the time, we did not know exactly what these crystals were, but it certainly seemed that they had been the cause of Max’s trouble.  After returning the bladder to its normal size, we finished the surgery and woke Max up.   We saved the urine sample so that we could send it to the lab the next day.  By doing that, we might be able to determine what the crystals are made of, and what we could do to prevent the same problem from occurring again in the future.

While the surgery revealed the issue and solved Max’s discomfort, we still had concerns.  There was a possibility that the blockage had caused severe and permanent damage to his bladder, meaning that Max might not be able to urinate on his own.  We made the decision to leave the urinary catheter in place for a few days and provide supportive care; this would give Max’s bladder an opportunity to heal.  At that point, all we could do is hope and pray and wait. 

The next morning, Max was acting just like a normal Labrador puppy again – barking, eating, and walking about his kennel asking for attention.  While we were all excited to see the progress, we knew that we’d still have to wait a few days to find out if Max was really going to be okay.  The test results returned and gave us some clues as to what caused Max’s problem.

It appears that Max had a urinary tract infection that created an ideal environment for the crystals to form in his urine.  Although this was still an unusual occurrence in a young puppy, we were happy to have some answers.  Max did very well throughout the rest of the day.  That night, however, he managed to pull out his urinary catheter.  It had only been 24 hours since the surgery, but I was hopeful that his bladder may have healed quickly and he would be able to urinate.  However, that was not the case – the next morning, Max seemed uncomfortable and appeared to be straining.  A quick ultrasound revealed a very full bladder.  Max was still unable to urinate on his own.  Max was anesthetized once again, and the urinary catheter was replaced.   He would need to remain with us for a few more days.

Max continued to act like a normal Labrador puppy over the next few days.  That Saturday marked Max’s 5^th day at the clinic, and he was starting to get a bit restless (well, he had been restless… he is a Labrador puppy, after all!).  Max’s bladder had been given 4 full days to heal, so the decision was made to remove the catheter.  Prayers were said, and the catheter was removed.  Within a few hours, to our joy and excitement, Max proved that he was able to urinate on his own.  Max’s parents were ecstatic to hear the news – their beloved Max could come home!

Nice People

Toby, enjoying Dr. Bean's gift from a client 

Welcome back to the blog-

Summer is gone, and things are a little slower at the clinic. That leaves us more time to talk to you about the things that go on here (as well as digging up some ghosts from my past, on occasion). It feels good to be back.

I wanted to dedicate this installment of the blog to some folks who have been exceptionally generous to us lately. The things that they’ve done have brightened up some rough days. I don’t normally name names in the blog, but I’ll make an exception for this one. There are some folks in this world that make life better, and they never get any press. Nice people deserve some recognition.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Thomason came to the clinic with his dog, Freedom. Freedom is a beautiful blue merle Australian Shepherd. She came in with some GI upset that, in the end, turned out not to be life threatening- despite the fact that she did lose some blood. When she first came in, I was admiring her owner’s Thundercats t-shirt. Thundercats was one of my favorite cartoons as a kid. I even had the comic books. Well, a couple of weeks after Freedom’s troubles were over, Mr. Thomason showed up with a thank-you card and a Thundercats shirt for me.  It rocks.  I wear it when I pick up my kids at school, despite the fact that only the parents have any idea who the Thundercats are.

We’ve got a couple of clients who bring in a healthy dose of humor.  Mr. Woodrow usually snips out anything animal related and funny from the newspaper and shares it with us when he comes in.  We always enjoy circulating them among the staff.

Ms. Kenny, a clever woman with an artistic bent, came in to get one of her pets checked out the other day. When the appointment was over, she said  “Hey, I’ve got something for you.”  From under her chair, she pulled out a bright blue, doll-sized stool.

I was puzzled.

“I know it’s kind of small, not like a real stool… it’s more like a stool sample.” she said.

I had to laugh. You can see the "stool sample" above in the picture with Toby.

Food is always a big hit at Branchville Animal Hospital.

The Cole family has a pack of small, white Chihuahuas. It might be more appropriate to call them a herd. They’ve been coming in for years. In the Cole household, there are some very accomplished dessert chefs- their creations rival what you see on the Food Network. They’ve sent so much sugary goodness our way in the past few weeks that we’re starting to wonder if they bought stock in an insulin manufacturer.

We get a lot of fresh produce as well.  One day last week, I came back from lunch and found a bushel of peas, a dozen ears of corn, and a sack full of banana and jalapeno peppers in my office. I had no idea where it came from.  As it turns out, some of the clinic neighbors, the Wilsons, put a bug in the ear of one of their friends, Mr. Honeycutt.  They had told him how much I had enjoyed the Wilsons’ produce that Mr. Honeycutt decided to bring me some as well.  Mr. Honeycutt and his dog have been coming in for seven years now- their first visit was right at a month after we opened. I had no idea that he was an accomplished gardener until last week.

One last specific instance:

One day, we had had a particularly bad morning. We had been working with a couple of families saying goodbye to pets after long illnesses. We also had some first time clients angry with their neighbors over what could be a poisoning case.  The receptionists (the most difficult job in the clinic, by the way) had been dealing with this high-pressure environment- helping some grieve and helping to calm frayed nerves.

We finally got things slowed down when Mr. Pike came through the front door, laden with fresh tomatoes from Sand Mountain. The mood changed instantly. It was a miracle of timing. Later on that day, I was looking at the big brown box full of bright red tomatoes in the clinic break room and thinking: just when you start to lose faith in humanity, in walks Mr. Pike with a box of tomatoes.

Good people are everywhere. I feel lucky that so many of them choose to come see us.

-RAB

The Other End of the Stethoscope

“I was praying that no clients saw me... They would have called an exorcist.”

With my job, I’m usually the one doing the diagnosing and surgery for other people. Recently, the tables have turned, and I got to see what it was like on the other end of the stethoscope…

A few weeks ago, I woke up having slept in an odd position. My shoulder felt a little funny, but I didn’t think much about it. I went to work and did my normal job all morning.  I did surgery, picked up dogs, wrestled angry cats, etc.- nothing was out of the ordinary.  The problem started when my wife and I left for lunch that day.  As we turned left out of the clinic parking lot to head for one of my favorite Odenville haunts, Charlie’s Barbecue, I felt a tightening in my neck as I held my head in place against the force of the turn.  One of the muscles clenched in a spasm, causing incredible pain in my neck and shoulder. The pain took my breath away.

Startled, my wife pulled over and I worked things out. The muscle relaxed slowly as I stretched it. I thought that things were going to be OK, so we went on to Charlie’s.  The restaurant has an open porch that you can eat on, and we were enjoying good food and nice weather when the spasms started again.  It wasn’t too bad at first- a spasm every five minutes or so.  It was painful, but I was doing my best to hide the issue.  My wife tried to convince me to go to the doctor, but I resisted.  I thought I could wait until tomorrow- I was wrong.

Before I could finish my food, the spasms were coming every minute. They were more and more painful, like the muscle was being torn every time the spasm hit. I was praying that no clients saw me writhing in pain in the Pig Sty (the official name for the deck area at Charlie’s). They would have called an exorcist.  I relented and told my wife that it couldn’t wait. To the doctor we went.  We were waiting in the doctor’s parking lot when the staff came back from lunch.

I have been to a doctor exactly 2 times in the last 10 years. I make it a habit to stay away if possible, but I was desperate.  I got lucky this time: the staff was able to get me into an exam room quickly.  While I was still in pain, the spasms were slowing… right up to the point when my doctor opened the exam room door.

Dr. R hadn’t even made it through the door of the exam room when a spasm hit and twisted me sideways, grunting with the effort to straighten myself back out.  In the midst of it, I couldn’t help but notice that he took a short step back from me (If you had seen that happen, how close would you want to stand?).  This happened several more times in the room while we talked.  Once, in the middle of a spasm, he grabbed my arm, planted the palm of his other hand just off the center of my chest, and folded my arm across my chest. The relief was instant. I sagged forward like a puppet with the strings cut.  Dr. R showed my wife how to put tension on the muscle to stretch it out.  He recommended rest and stretches.  But then came the tough part: treatment options. 

The ideal plan was to use a drug that would relax my muscles, but as a side effect, might leave me fuzzy-headed. I had a business meeting that night that couldn’t be rescheduled, and needed to be mentally sharp. Fuzzy-headedness wasn’t an option. Another part of the plan would be to give me a shot in the rump to get some fast relief. I had two problems with that one:

1. I’m not a big fan of needles.  They are fine when I’m vaccinating a dog.  They are downright scary when sticking me.
2. My doctor is a client. The nurse assisting him was a client as well. If I had to drop my pants in front of these people, I could never look them in the face again. When someone sticks a needle in your backside, your relationship with them is changed forever. You can quote me on that.

In the end, Dr. R had mercy on me and worked around my hang-ups. They gave me some tablets in the office. The ride home was rough, but two hours, one nap, and a lot of stretching later, I was almost pain free and had recovered enough to go to my meeting without incident.  Dr. R even called me the next morning to make sure that I was functional. I was, and I was grateful for it. I was back at work and doing well, but because I was on meds, I didn’t allow myself to do surgery for a few days.

 So what did I learn?

1. I learned a new level of sympathy for animals in pain. Pain is the opposite of fun.
2. I learned that being flexible with treatment recommendations is important, even if I don’t understand why people don’t want to go with my first recommendation. My doctor had conviction about what was best for me medically and stuck to his guns about it. I appreciate that tremendously. I also appreciate that he was able to find alternatives that I could live with.

My plans for the immediate future? To stay on my preferred end of the stethoscope.

-RAB

The Possum Tale, or, Pride Cometh Before the Fall

“The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.” 
― Madeleine L'Engle

When I was a kid, the rules for Show-And-Tell in public schools were, to say the least, lenient.  It was the highlight of the week, something kids looked forward to for a long time.  In Ms. Braden’s second-grade class at my now-defunct elementary school, it was an opportunity to really show off.  One particular week, fate brought me an opportunity to show off like no other elementary school kid has had before or since.

One night, my brother and I were out riding the 4-wheeler in a pasture near my parents’ house. In the glint of the headlight, we saw a small, furry creature trundling along across the pasture. It was a baby possum. The opportunity to try to catch it for a closer look was too great to resist. My brother and I hatched a plan: he would stay near the area where we last saw it while I rode off to get a plastic bucket to snag it in. I drove back to the house as fast as I could.  I quickly returned, bucket in hand.  We scooped the little guy up and carried him back to the house.  I was proud to show him off to my folks, but I had larger audience in mind.

I have to pause in the story to talk a little bit about possums.  The name “Opossum” is from an American Indian word that means something like “White Beast” if I remember right.  Seems appropriate.  They deserve the name “beast” when cornered.

Have you ever cornered a possum?  They hiss and open their mouth to show you all 50 of their teeth. I know 50 teeth seems like an exaggeration, but that’s what the reference literature cites (after my experience with this particular possum, I think it’s closer to 200).  If you’d like to see their teeth, just irritate one.  It will be happy to show them to you.

Angry possums have the attitude of a rattlesnake with a migraine. [Speaking of rattlesnakes, did you know that possums have partial (and in some cases, complete) immunity to rattlesnake and other pit viper bites? How tough do you have to be to have that ability?]  While possums may appear like cute woodland creatures, they are vicious animals anxious to gnaw any limb they can reach.  At least, that’s my experience…

Anyway, back to the story:

The day after I took the possum home just happened to be show-and-tell. I begged my parents to let me take the beast to school, and they figured that it would be something different- perhaps even educational- so they agreed. The next morning found me standing at the end of my driveway in the fog with a shoe box under my arm, waiting to board the bus.  There is no prouder person than an eight-year-old boy with a possum in a box for show-and-tell.

The anticipation that morning was nearly too much for me to bear. The occasional scratching sounds from the box inside my old metal desk faintly echoed through the morning, heightening the tension. Finally, after lunch, the big moment came.

I stood before my class and opened the lid of the box.  I basked in the adulation of my peers. The possum was the hit of the class, cute in an ugly way, peacefully staring back at the throng of children with small, black, beady eyes. I don’t believe that any of my classmates had ever seen one before, and certainly not this close.

Word got around the school about what I had brought, and requests started coming in from other teachers (who, I will assume, were looking for something interesting for their science classes) that they wanted the possum to make appearances in their classes as well. Instead of being in my class that afternoon, I was making rounds of the lower-grade classrooms, showing off the Marsupial Marvel.

I was going through the hall from one class to another when I ran into one of my buddies.  He quickly cornered me with an eye on the box.

“Is the possum in there? I want to see it!” he said.

Unable to resist the pull of elementary school stardom, I opened the box and looked at my friend’s face to see his reaction.

“Is it dead?” he asked, with a befuddled look.

I looked into the box and saw the unthinkable: the baby possum was twisted in an odd position, motionless, in the box.

‘He was fine a minute ago!” I said, as I poked him with my finger.

You can guess where this is headed, can’t you?

The tiny beast sprang to life and clamped down on my right index finger with lightning speed.  Three of its needle-like teeth went right through the fingernail. It was stuck on my hand.

I started trying to shake it off my hand, gripped with terror.  No luck.  My buddy was backing away from me, as if he didn’t know who the next intended victim was. I panicked and did the only thing I could think of.

In the hallway, there was an old steel water fountain that had been in the school since it was built in the 50’s. I swung my hand, with the woodland creature attached, as hard as I could. If you’ve ever seen a bad kung-fu movie, you know what that sounded like.  A giant GONG rang down the hallway.

The possum fell straight to the ground and immediately scuttled behind the fountain, unharmed but highly agitated. With some coaxing and careful maneuvering, my buddy and I got the possum back in the box.  But by this time all the commotion in the hall had caused a lot of classroom doors to open. Suddenly, I had more than my share of unwanted attention as we recovered the White Beast and I wrapped my throbbing hand.

And so it goes. Sometimes, the brighter a star is, the faster it burns out.

From that point forward, there were no live animals allowed at show and tell. I guess that the powers that be decided it wasn’t the kind of educational experience they wanted kids to have. It was certainly educational for me.

-RAB

On Being a Vet's Wife

The blog this time is from Karen, Dr. Bean's wife.  It's a different perspective on the life of a small town vet.

This was not what I had planned.

It was 9:00PM on New Year’s Eve night and I was holding two pieces of small intestine while my husband was trying to stitch them together.  We were standing on either side of the surgery table over a dog that was on the losing side of a dogfight.  In the background, we could hear our two kids watching a movie in his office (they were ecstatic… a movie and delayed bedtime in the same night!).  My husband, Dr. Bean, had just removed an eighteen inch section of bowel that had been too severely injured.  This type of surgery is called a resection.  The body has an amazing way of healing itself and functioning without the extra length of bowel.  I was helping with the surgery because it was a holiday night and our hardworking staff deserve some time with their families.  I had assisted in surgery several times before and I usually enjoy it.  But, this night was different.

This night, Dr. Bean was reaching the end of the procedure, the only thing left was to stitch the two ends of bowel back together and close the surgery site.  However, he was having trouble with this because his target kept moving.  It was my fault- I no longer had my eyes on the bowel.  He thought boredom had set in and I wasn’t paying attention (it had been a long night and a long surgery).  This was not the case.  I was looking anywhere but down as I tried my best not to pass out and hit the floor.  The edges of my field of vision had begun to darken and I could hear the telltale ringing in my ears.  I was on my way to a full fledged faint, but was too proud to admit it.

At this time, I would like to point out that I don’t have a weak stomach.  I have cleaned up after several dogs and cats plus lived with two kids.  I have helped clean fish and deliver puppies.  I’ve assisted in surgery plenty of times.  However, something about that night and that operation sent me over the edge.

I was able to hold on a little longer.  Thankfully, Dr. Bean had come to a point where I could take a break.  I took the chance to sit on the floor where I could watch the dog’s breathing and monitor the anesthesia machine, all while resting my head on my knees.

He thought this was amusing.  I thought it was humiliating.

This was definitely not what I had planned.  It was not what I had planned for a late New Year’s Eve night.  It was not what we had originally planned for our careers over fifteen years ago when we got married. 

I must say though, that I love our life.  I love having a family business where we can work together and where our kids can visit.  I love that we have built a business that can provide for us and our employees.  I love that we get to work with a great group of folks: our employees and our clients.  I love being part of a small town where complete strangers stop me to tell me that my husband is wonderful.  I do love this.

There are some things about being a vet’s wife that are not so great.  We take separate cars to church in case he gets an emergency call during service.  Family vacations have to be carefully planned away from major holidays, spring break, or summer since we normally have a lot of boarders at those times.  We’ve spent many restless nights with a howling dog or cat in our laundry room at home when my husband was too worried to leave it alone at the clinic overnight.

These are the types of things that we never had to deal with in our previous life.  Twelve years ago, we were both working in an Atlanta suburb.  He was an associate at a small animal clinic, I was a research engineer for a large consumer products company.  The future was mapped out: we would both work our way up with our employers with no significant changes ahead.  Our lives revolved around our careers and fighting traffic and we didn’t mind too much.  We worked our eight to ten hours a day and went home leaving the office behind us.

Then we had our son in 2002 and suddenly hour long commutes were no longer so much fun.  By the time our son was 2, we were looking for a way out.  The idea of owning a practice had not previously appealed to Dr. Bean- the hours are long and the financial risk is high.  But owning a practice would allow us to move back to Alabama, near our families, and keep me at home, at least part-time, with the kids.  We were soon exploring the idea of opening a clinic and building a new life in a small town.

So fast forward to 2012…. we’ve traded the corporate world for the world of small business in a small town.  We no longer have a boss to gripe about; we are the bosses.  We’ve swapped the hour long commutes for school carpooling and walking dogs.  Work now follows us home and sometimes it seems like it’s all we talk about.  And we love it.

Scully, the World’s Best Dog, part 2.

In one of the previous installments of this blog, we told you about Scully, one of the animals we have treated for cancer.  Her type of cancer, lymphoma, is one of the few that are treated in the private practice setting on a regular basis.  You may remember from the earlier blog, that typical life expectancy after lymphoma treatment was 6 to 12 months and Scully had just passed the 16 month mark.  It may not sound long, but sixteen months means a lot of walks and doggie treats.

Scully had come in a couple of times during early November.  Things started to look progressively worse as the weeks passed, and her lymph nodes were getting larger.  We re-started chemotherapy in hopes that we could buy her even more time, despite the fact that she was well beyond average survival times already.

The day before Thanksgiving, Scully’s Mom brought her in and let me check her over once more.  The news wasn’t good: her disease simply wasn’t responding to the drugs anymore.

As I ran my hands over her, feeling the changes that the cancer was making, the right decision became clear.  I turned to Scully’s owner and recommended that they discontinue treatment. They did.

Things went along relatively normally until a couple of days before Christmas.  Scully had started to have some bad days.  She had an episode of weakness on Christmas Eve in the afternoon and evening, and I wound up talking to and checking in on them a couple of times that night.

I called back Christmas morning and found out that she had passed away the night before.  She had followed her owners outside to the mailbox that evening as she always did- it was sort of a ritual- and on her way back into the house she simply collapsed.  She passed away in her owner’s arms.

It was the best way I could have imagined it happening, really- She was at home doing the simple things that made her happy, and she was with the people she loved.  Her owners had been wrestling with the decision to euthanize ever since her turn for the worse. The stress of that decision hanging over their heads was a real burden for them, and understandably so.  As it happened, they didn’t have to make that call.

Whenever we get into the more intensive medical treatments in animals with a questionable prognosis, we always have to ask ourselves a series of questions.  What are the most likely outcomes if we proceed?  What are the risks?  Is the price something that the owner has the ability and desire to take on?

These types of decisions can become complex quickly; emotions have a heavy influence in how we approach things.  In Scully’s case, it turns out that the decision to treat her did have a good payoff.  She had well over a year of extra life, with the majority of it spent feeling good and being with the family she had always been with.  I feel good about that.

My wife is doing a guest blog about being married to a veterinarian, which should be interesting.  She’ll publish it in a week or two.

 

A teaser for my next blog:

Remember show and tell at your elementary school?  Me too.
Did you ever take a live possum?  I did.
It turned out to be more exciting than I had planned…-RAB

First Christmas with Sam

About a year after we got married, my wife and I adopted a little fuzzball of a kitten from the barn next door to my parents’ farm. We named him Sam, and he came to live with us in Auburn. By December of that year, Sam was a few months old and well on his way to being pure pandemonium.

It was my second year of vet school and we were getting ready to wind things down for the Christmas break.  I remember walking through the pine straw in the yard and up the steps to my front door.  I had just finished a 2 hour Parasitology lab and I was ready to come home and relax for the evening.

When I opened the front door, my wife was standing there with tears streaming down her face.

Initially, I thought something terrible had happened: a death in the family, trouble with her coursework (she is an engineer by training, and her classes at the time were intense to say the least), obviously it had to be something terrible and unforeseen…

She looked up at me and said “I’m going to kill that cat. Don’t let me see him.” And then she walked away. Over her shoulder, I saw the trouble at last: the Christmas tree, ornaments and all, had gone down in flames like the Hindenburg. I could only assume that the cat was to blame. Oh, the humanity.

I picked my way across the living room through the ornaments, fragments of ornaments, and shattered Christmas Cheer to get closer to the scene. The tree was lying full length on the floor in a significantly less idyllic state than it was the night before.

What was left of it looked a lot like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree- a sad arrangement of stem and twigs held together by nothing more than hope. There were ornaments and pieces of ornaments strewn from the bathroom door, through the den, and into the kitchen. The whole scene was so ridiculous that I laughed out loud. Then I realized that I hadn’t seen the cat since I walked in. He had vanished.

I pieced this part of it together later, after an interview with the only witness to the crime:

When my wife came in from class, she saw the tree immediately when she opened the door. She stood looking at it for a second, dumbstruck, when Sam blazed by her. He was tearing through the living room, rolling an ornament ahead of him with his paws like a soccer player on his way to an uncontested goal. She immediately put together what had happened, and the chase was on.

Being the stealthy creature he was, Sam quickly decided that the best tactic was to get under a piece of furniture and hide until he was found, then sprint beneath another one when his pursuer got within arms’ reach. This apparently went on for a while. My wife eventually lost track of him. Sam escaped capture, which is a good thing for him. If she had caught him at that moment, no power in the universe could have saved him.

I started my search for the half-grown cat in all his usual hangouts, and found no sign of him. About half an hour later, I found him backed into a corner behind a toilet, shaking, with his eyes as big as saucers. Sam and I had a talk, and we decided that it would be best if he steered clear of Mommy for a few days.

Sam is 15 now.  He no longer plays the way he used to and his eyesight is patchy at best.  Thankfully with age comes wisdom and Sam has learned to leave the Christmas tree alone. We won’t have many more Christmases with him, but he made his first one very, very memorable.

-RAB

Random Trivia

courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com



I’ve met some interesting people and seen some interesting things in the 22 years I’ve been working in veterinary practices. A lot of them are too short to justify a whole blog entry, so I decided to put a few into a trivia-style blog. Some things are just too strange to not pass along…

1. I once broke into a vet clinic when I was a teenager… to walk the dogs on a Thanksgiving morning. I didn’t have a key, and the person who had the key and was supposed to help me was over an hour late. I had to scale a wall to access the door to the kennels. All the dogs got their Thanksgiving treats, and I got home in time for Thanksgiving Lunch with my family. And my co-worker?  She showed up just as I was walking the last dog.

2. I worked at a clinic that had one of America’s few female serial killers as a client. Her name was Audrey Marie Hilley, and she was from Anniston, Alabama. Her nickname was The Black Widow. She even bounced a check at the clinic. They didn’t pursue her for payment… I wonder why… If you want to know more about her, Wiki has a pretty good article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Marie_Hilley

3. Have you ever ultrasounded a llama to see if it was pregnant while it spat on you repeatedly in protest?  I have.

4. Scared Straight: I have seen one rabid animal. It was a bat found climbing up a screen door to someone’s back porch in the middle of the day.  I didn’t take the appropriate precautions for my personal safety when I sent the sample to the State for testing. This was a bad decision on my part, because I wound up having to list myself as a “potentially exposed” individual with the State of Alabama Department of Public Health. That led to a significant amount of paperwork.  I was 17 years old.  I’ve never taken a potentially rabid animal lightly since.

5. Just after Branchville Animal Hospital opened, I had a very nice lady bring me a snake to identify. It was in her basement, and she and a neighbor had captured it in a 20-ounce drink bottle. You should have seen her face when I told her it was poisonous. I have no idea how they got it into the bottle without getting bitten.

6. My worst on-the-job injury was a bite not from a dog or a cat, but from a gerbil named Zippy.  It was awful and I might have to write a whole blog about it later.

If any of you guys want to hear more about the incidents I wrote about this time, drop me a line and let me know. Thanks, everybody, and have a safe Halloween!

-RAB