Weekend On Call

Weekends on call have to be the toughest part of the job, especially in a mixed practice. So far I've had about 3 hours sleep since I started work on Friday morning.

Last night was hard work - just me and various sick animals. I'd have killed for a nurse to be there to give me hand! Dogs having seizures filled the majority of my evening after a busy day consulting and the night was spent monitoring them at work. In the end I gave up coming home between visits and just bedded down at work.

This morning I planned to come home for a shower and breakfast...which didn't happen until 1. Only 21 more hours to go.

Quick Change

I love this job because of the variety we see on a daily basis.

Today I was visiting a farm for some sick cattle, we had the usual chat about housing, the weather, the job and everything else whilst trying to examine some mad yearling beef cattle. Just when I thought we were done for the day, liberally coated in various bodily fluids, the farmer pops the question that always comes up:

"While you're here, can you just look at....."

This is why all calls take twice as long as they should. Examining cow to cat in the matter of minutes. Love it.

This isn't the cow I was examining. But hey, close enough.

Sometimes I forget...

...that I'm actually qualified and a real person now. People keep asking for opinions on clinical matters, but even more worrying I seem to have the answers at least some of the time.

The past 2 weeks have been manic with busy consultations and various emergencies. In the space of 48 hours we had 5 RTAs! One day I started to X-ray a cat at 9am calculating sedation drugs and then met the first of many RTA dogs. On the plus side most of them survived with only one casualty. It was so manic we even had students keeping an eye on some of the inpatients.

Farm work isn't going as well though. There isn't a lot of it going around and the usual farm vets take most of it. This leaves me with the emergency work which would be great if only I had the experience to deal with it. Over the next few weeks I'm hoping to be more proactive and grab some more farm work to get me up to speed.

Equine work, as ever, is evil.

Happy New Year!

It's New Year! Woo! I've been coughing up a lung for the past couple of days, and I'm on call. Not a great start to the year, but these things happen. Not too many patients in and hopefully people will realise it's Sunday and we are still closed. Tomorrow morning may be a different matter.

I may try to blog a night on call at some point, but it depends on if I can be bothered to turn the computer on at 3am. Unlikely.