Bed Physics 101

Nobody Believes Me! (Except Cam)

Now, bed comfyness is directly proportional to the amount of cushioning you have yourself, inversely proportional to how much NOT like a bed it looks like and inversely proportional to the number of curves you have.

Therefore, the most comfy bed for me with my practically non-existent body fat and bony female curves that jutt out, is... the couch! Any couch!

I can sleep anywhere, except in my own bed. Maybe I need to start drinking nightcaps.

Why I Identify With Pregnant Women

Lower Back Pain

No, I am not preggers.

2 weeks ago I "sprained" my right lower butt muscle (I presume) while bending down in the morning to get something off the floor. The pain was so bad I nearly couldn't stand up and comtemplated not going to extra-mural at the emergency centre. But who was going to take care of the animals if they got flooded with work? I tenderly and slowly made my way there. After bringing one of the weak little dogs frequently out for "walks" my behind slowly healed itself. Fine. The end of my sprained butt woes?

No.

On Wednesday morning while apparently bending the wrong way to put on my shoes, I did it AGAIN, this time to my left side. Although I could still walk the chronic pain was much worse. I had to limp and standing and sitting were the worst. Thank goodness animal behaviour was a relatively short stint that day.

On Thursday during opthamology while bending down to look into a cat's eyes I yelped "Ow my butt!" in front of the vet. Everyone chuckled. She didn't really seem to believe how I had "pulled my butt". Later in the afternoon I massaged Brian's abnormally stiff left shoulder (I'm the group's "physiotherapist") in between consults when the vet came in and exclaimed with a smile : " What next, are you going to get him to massage your butt too?". Ha ha.

On Friday in oncology I was constantly lagging behind everyone else while walking to and fro from the chemotherapy unit to the clinic having intermittent spasms of pain doing so. The really happy dogs with cancer (you wouldn't have known it, chemo does so much good) didn't really help by pulling on their leads.

Thank goodness for (good) chiros. One visit to Murdoch's chiroparctic clinic today diagnosed me with a lower back sprain (other possible differentials were a slipped disc! Phew!), a quick adjustment and I could walk upright with relatively little pain! The clinician asked me : "Are you carrying sheep?"
I told him : "No, but some of the dogs in the clinic can be HEAVIER than sheep."

I'm not out of the woods yet, I have to be quite careful in the next two weeks. Movement in one plane only, not bending and twisting!

The Newest Thing in Dog Nutrition : Sharon-Flavoured Dog Food!

Why Sick Dogs Only Eat From My Hand
"Melts in Your Mouth! And Also In My Hand!"

One thing you get a lot of in the clinic is sick dogs. And I mean REALLY sick dogs. Who don't even want to eat a whole variety of commercial and home cooked chicken that we try to offer them. Sometimes we even try cat food because its smellier. And nothing work sometimes.

I had a Dobermann after having neck surgery not want to eat, after trying everything in the clinic, I finally resorted to just force feeding cooked chicken into his mouth. After multilple tries of stuffing tiny pieces into his mouth he slowly realised that this was tasty! He stopped resisting my attempts to feed him and started licking the chicken, "juice" and all off my hand. I tried to offer the same chicken to him in a bowl but he wouldn't have it. Once it was in my hand he licked it off with moderate hungryness. Strange.

There was another doggy in after she got hit by a car. Tried the smelliest food and had no luck. Then a vet took a look at her breed (staffordshire bull terrier)and suggested dry food. It worked! But only in my hand. At least initially to get her munchy then she would go for it in a bowl.

What is it with these dogs? Is it their colour? (Both are black, or shades thereof), or do things just taste nicer in MY hands? I think the only "added" tastes my hands would have in the clinic are the chlorhexidine disinfectant soap that I use frequently there. Maybe the cultures who eat with their hands have soemthing going that we utensil weilding folk haven't realised yet.

I think I will just have to continue feeding sick doggies from my hands and live with the smell of chicken, canned food and dog drool on my hands.

Time Warp!

I've been so busy in vet school that it doesn't even feel that one and a half years have gone by already and it didn't feel like the month of June that just passed by because I was spending most of my time in school anyway.

Now, in chronology of dates I have forgotten are:

1. After swapping extra-mural dates with 2 different people (out of the goodness of my heart, ha ha )and not checking my schedule and just assuming that I had the first week of my 4 week holiday off, I FORGOT to turn up on the first day of my extra-mural week. I only realised it late in the afternoon that the date was, indeed the 11th of June. The charge nurses just laughed, and Dr Peter didn't seem that amused, but by the weekend was quite cordial about it all. Anyway it worked out well because surgery wasn't taken (somehow not many people like surgery, most prefer doing medicine or general practice, good for me!) and I volunteered to do an extra day in clinics. I wonder why some of the nurses think I live in uni...

2. Having had most of my flatmates move out on various dates, I somehow associated it with Hammy coming over on the 27th of the holiday month. Having Equine extra-mural that week I was stressing out over how I could make time to fetch her and her family at the airport. AND she hadn't given me concrete plans either. And she was due to come in a few days! Aaah! So I started hounding her on email and even SMS, and when I signed off "Yay! Hammy's coming over tomorrow!" did the mix up show up glaringly. She emailed back "Sharon! I'm coming on the 27th of JULY!". Oops. We must be the worst best friends in the world. We can't even remember each other's birthdays. Speaking about birthdays...

3. Seeing as I didn't even feel it was June, while talking to the folks back home it dawned on me I had forgotten my brother's birthday! After apologising profusely and thinking that he was one year older than he actually was, he really didn't seem to care much and said it was ok. Good on you bro! (Actually he doesn't really care about my birthday either, we must be the worst siblings in the world!); )

One Surgery, Two Surgery, Three Surgery, FLOOR!

The Day I Nearly Fainted in Surgery

During my extra-mural week in small animal clinics (I got to do surgery! Yes!) I bugged Dr Aaron to let me scrub in on an exploratory laparotomy ("We don't know what's wrong with your dog, maybe if we open him up we'll find something...") or some other similar abdominal surgery, I forget. As you will see, forgetting will be a common line in this thread.

That morning I had forgotten to eat anything substantial at all, the only sustanance was probably a quickie swill of good ol' H2O from my trusty non-spill coffee mug. Therein lay the major problem, hypoglycaemia. Sometimes when there is a lot of work to do in the clinic I just delay eating as long as I possibly can until theres a lull where I feel safe enough to duck out and nuke my food in the same microwave they use to heat up the dog food. Sad but true. But I cover my food!

Come 3PM and I still hadn't eaten anything and the dog went into surgery. And I wasn't one to miss out on a surgery I could scrub into! So I scrubbed in. Wasn't feeling at all faint, I sort of get an adrenaline rush during surgery. Ha ha.

Didn't find anything interesting inside the abdomen, so while Dr Aaron was closing up the dog, he decided to point out something to me and asked me what it was. My mind was drawing a half blank: "It's a ligament?"

Dr Aaron: "Yes, now Dr Sharon, what ligament is it?" (The surgeons all call each other doctor more for the fun of it than anything else.)

I was getting a bit more stressed as I thought I had learnt this before, I wanted to say "falciform ligament" on the tip of my tongue but on further thought didn't seem to be correct as it normally lay just inside the abdomen, not nearer the surface.

Then Dr Mark tried to further the interrogation and said :" It's starts with a P..."

Still drawing a blank, Dr Aaron said:" It's on Dr Mark's side and pointing to him!"

Looking down I saw the dog's penis and said apprehensively :" The penile ligament?"

Dr Mark took a set of haemostats ("clamps") and waved it around the end part of the penis to help me. Dr Aaron said :" It's staring you in the face!"

At that point I felt lightheaded and mumbled :" I need food..." and as an instinctive survival mechanism started to curl my head lower than my chest, still keeping sterile what I needed to keep sterile!

Dr Aaron finally noticed something amiss :" Do you need to lie down?"

I managed to muster up a :" Yes..." as much as I didn't want to leave, the only other option was fainting into a sterile field.

As Carrie the theatre nurse quickly helped me out of my gown, gloves, hat and mask Dr Mark went:" It's the preputial ligament!" just as I managed to stumble out into the prep room and said hello to the floor just moments before I would actually have fainted.

I will now never forget that the white line near the penis is the preputial ligament. = )