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What It's All About
Aug. 21st, 2004 06:17 pmWork has been slow for the past several weeks. Really slow. Counting the tiles on the walls, braiding your eyelashes, soul-rotting slow. I'm sure that there are some people for whom getting paid to stare into space and do nothing for ten hours at a stretch is the perfect job, but I'm not one of them. Between that and other office issues, I've been wondering off and on why I bother with this job at all.
Today started out down the same path. Not too many appointments, nothing particularly exciting on the schedule, no challenge or excitement beyond a rather nasty dog with a rather nasty ear infection. I excused myself from the exam room and wandered into the back of the office to hunt down a muzzle for said dog, and nearly bumped into the other doctor on duty. She held an animal out to me - a rather distended chihuahua with a pair of feet sticking out of her vulva - and said, in a bright, cheerful, not-quite-panicked voice, 'Help, please?'
The feet, of course, were blue and cold. Not a particularly good sign. They were also not much smaller than mama-dog's own feet, which is even worse. I asked my coworker if she had ever delivered backwards, oversized puppies before, and she answered in the negative. Neither had I. Better by the minute.
A nurse ducked out to inform the gent with the nasty-eared dog that I would be temporarily detained, and I started poking at the feet. Coming to the conclusion that, while pulling too hard might cause damage to the almost-puppy, failing to pull would certainly end up even worse, my coworker and I greased the heck out of the poor thing with sterile lube and started pulling. Mama-dog did not particularly appreciate this, but she did her best to help. Five minutes later, we had everything but a head, and it seemed like that was as far as we were likely to get. At this point, my coworker became rather concerned about the possibility of having to push the poor pup back in and deliver it by C-section.
"Give me one more try," I asked, lifting the limp blue body attatched to the limp blue feet, and reached in as far as I could. I have no idea how I managed to fit my fingers into a four-pound dog far enough to reach the not-so-little chin stuck in there, but a few minutes and a very loud yelp later, I squeezed a rather sad and bedraggled looking puppy into the nurse's hand.
And it breathed.
Fifteen minutes in the birth canal, at least, the color and temperature of picnic-cooler ice packs, and it breathed. And its tiny paws paddled feebly as mama-dog licked it like her life depended on it.
I don't know which felt better, seeing the puppy happily nursing with its brother (who was about half the first puppy's size, and slid out without problem half an hour later) or watching the owners' faces as we handed mama and babies back to them alive and well.
Yeah, that's why I do this.
Today started out down the same path. Not too many appointments, nothing particularly exciting on the schedule, no challenge or excitement beyond a rather nasty dog with a rather nasty ear infection. I excused myself from the exam room and wandered into the back of the office to hunt down a muzzle for said dog, and nearly bumped into the other doctor on duty. She held an animal out to me - a rather distended chihuahua with a pair of feet sticking out of her vulva - and said, in a bright, cheerful, not-quite-panicked voice, 'Help, please?'
The feet, of course, were blue and cold. Not a particularly good sign. They were also not much smaller than mama-dog's own feet, which is even worse. I asked my coworker if she had ever delivered backwards, oversized puppies before, and she answered in the negative. Neither had I. Better by the minute.
A nurse ducked out to inform the gent with the nasty-eared dog that I would be temporarily detained, and I started poking at the feet. Coming to the conclusion that, while pulling too hard might cause damage to the almost-puppy, failing to pull would certainly end up even worse, my coworker and I greased the heck out of the poor thing with sterile lube and started pulling. Mama-dog did not particularly appreciate this, but she did her best to help. Five minutes later, we had everything but a head, and it seemed like that was as far as we were likely to get. At this point, my coworker became rather concerned about the possibility of having to push the poor pup back in and deliver it by C-section.
"Give me one more try," I asked, lifting the limp blue body attatched to the limp blue feet, and reached in as far as I could. I have no idea how I managed to fit my fingers into a four-pound dog far enough to reach the not-so-little chin stuck in there, but a few minutes and a very loud yelp later, I squeezed a rather sad and bedraggled looking puppy into the nurse's hand.
And it breathed.
Fifteen minutes in the birth canal, at least, the color and temperature of picnic-cooler ice packs, and it breathed. And its tiny paws paddled feebly as mama-dog licked it like her life depended on it.
I don't know which felt better, seeing the puppy happily nursing with its brother (who was about half the first puppy's size, and slid out without problem half an hour later) or watching the owners' faces as we handed mama and babies back to them alive and well.
Yeah, that's why I do this.
