Canine's Canine To The Face

The vet world can be a dangerous place, bites and scratches are the usual hazard that we are all aware of. Everyone can recognise the grumpy cat, the Collie that gives you that "look" and the sore old Labrador who can give a growl when you move him. We all know to take precautions. As one of my friends put it, "If you're not careful you could lose a finger, and that's the end of your career".

It wasn't a big scary dog that managed to get me however. It wasn't a cat. Or a parrot. It was a 20 week old Labrador puppy. She had had surgery a few days previously and was just about to go home, so I went to say goodbye. She is the softest puppy you would ever meet, but now getting to full bounce. We'd been having a few talks about jumping up and it looked like she was getting the message.

This time she got a little overexcited though and bounced at my face. Not too scary, she'd be trying to lick me all week, except I was just getting up at the time and took the full force of her nose to my face. Initially I didn't think much of it, then the bleeding started. Oh yes, the bleeding started from my nose. A quick investigation revealed a split inside my nostril out to the real world. Lovely! The poor puppy looked very sad and a bit scared!

I was all for using tissue glue to close this up. Apparently it wasn't allowed, so a trip to A&E was in order. Two sutures (and a bit of a chat about dentals with the doctor) later I was released to head on home.

Everything has healed now, there is a small scar that is barely noticeable, and I'm back to work once again. It's not the big scary dogs that get me apparently, it's the little cute one that lull me in to a false sense of security!

Back Yet Again

Well I'm back again. It's not been a fun few months and I've had quite a few things to get on with at work and out of work meaning I've let this slide a bit. Things have started to calm down now so I've decided to write again.

So since last time I've had a pretty dull time being off ill. After the illness in October I've had a range of signs and symptoms which have meant I've been unable to work, especially at nights, for a variety of reasons. To combat this I was given a month off work in November to recover my strength. In this time there were various trips to doctors around and about and too many tests to count. Thankfully all these have come back negative for nasties, but I'm still having the main symptoms of feeling exhausted and occasionally weak and dizzy. Not fun.

I was back at work over Christmas, but found I was truly exhausted after only 5 days of work and would be sleeping for 14 hours a night. My doctor also recommended that I don't work nights as that would make me worse.

All of this meant I wasn't able to keep up with my rotating internship. It wasn't fair on the other interns and I couldn't be signed off as having completed an internship if I wanted to progress to a medicine or surgery residency. I was however offered a chance to continue working at the hospital in a different intern position which I happily took.

So now I'm the anaesthesia intern! This means I may be able to become an anaesthesia resident and continue to learn more, which is where I was leaning towards anyway. Currently I'm only in 3 days a week, but hopefully I'll be building this up to 4, then 5 days and then possible on call at some point. I even have a few projects to do on my days off to keep my mind busy.

I do have a few fun stories and some cute puppy pictures to post later, but now back to work!

Back Again

So what's happened recently? Not much really apart from work and play. I've been on quite a few rotations since my last entry and mostly loved them. There wasn't a whole lot of work on imaging, but oncology was fairly busy.

A few weeks ago I was a bit ill and had a brief hospital stay. It wasn't the most fun experience (I'm pretty sure our patients get treated better) that ended up with me discharging myself after waiting for an ultrasound scan for several hours.

Feeling better now though and back on to night duty. I'm still feeling tired a lot of the time, but the current batch of students are very useful and I'm getting some rest.

Time Off

Internship is all fun and lots is being learned but sometimes time away is required. This weekend I took an evening off to escape to the city, see some of the festival and meet up with a few old friends who were visiting. It was a great night out!

I find it far too easy to stay late here and follow cases that I've become involved with even if I should have been away hours earlier. Work-life balance is important though, and so more time will be spent escaping.

Night Shift

Well that was fun! I survived my week on the night shift. It was fairly bad with at least 3 cases there each night, but everything survived, even the 2 animals that tried to die at once.

There were a variety of emergency cases such as the feather plucking cockatiel at 3am and the sick Labrador (has he eaten something? Are you sure?), although most of the people that called me weren't actually our clients. It was very strange that I had to send at least 4 people back to their own vets, including one complex cases that was in Northumberland who we'd never seen! They weren't even in the area! Weird.

Still catching up on sleep. I went to a friend's wedding this weekend. It was great, but I was exhausted.

First Few Weeks

It's been a while since I've been able to write anything due to lack of computer access and no internet connection, but so far today the wireless is working. Woo!

The internship is going well. I have been switching from service to service as required including exotics and feline medicine. So far I'm loving being back, it's great to see everyone again. Some people even seem to remember my name which is rather worrying.

Night work starts tomorrow which I am not looking forward to, although at least there will be various people around for backup should it be required. After that I'm moving from one flat to another in the intern building, then heading off to a wedding.

Back to journal review for tomorrow.

Interning changes

There's been a few changes to the intern program whilst I've been in Wales! First of all I'm starting a 13 month course instead of the usual 12 to cover various holidays and locum on the services. It will hopefully give me extra time to figure out what I'm doing and get me settled in too. And any more time in Wales and I'd go insane.

Currently there are 3 interns who share the load between them. This means 1 week in 3 is nights, and they work every 3rd weekend. I think someone may have mentioned the working time directive as on a busy weekend the on call vet may only have 8 hours sleep total! So now there are 4 new interns.

This means we will only be working 1 in 4 weeks of nights (only 12 weeks? Doesn't sounds like a lot!) but to cover the weekend efficiently we are going to be working 1 in 2 weekends. Basically if anyone is looking for me, it's a good bet that I'll be at work.

And finally a big YAY! to all the final years who passed their exams, including my Lab Partner from first year. Well done!