Friday, January 2

Happy New Year!

Today was an interesting day at the Vet. Dr. S has been on vacation so today I followed Dr. D and Dr. J (mostly Dr. D) around. I got to watch a cat neuter which I've never seen before so that was great! While neuters in general are pretty simple and quick procedures, cat neuters seemed to be simpler and quicker (it's a product of the anatomy of cats vs. dogs, according to Dr. D and the Vet student there with us) than dog neuters. We also had a spay on a cockapoo. Spays are much more intricate processes but they're very neat to watch up close...especially because I recently took a course on Reproductive Physiology in Animals (last spring), so I knew what I was looking at and I knew what Dr. D was referring to as he walked us through the procedure.

Ashley came back today. It seems that the ADC found that her platelet count was EXTREMELY low. (Don't quote me on these numbers, but I believe Dr. D told me that she went from a 150,000 count to a 35,000 count the next day) It was suspected that maybe the foreign substance she'd gotten into was rat poison. I don't remember the specifics of how they treated her at the ADC but if she'd gotten into rat poison, the treatment there should have cleared it up. However, she came back to us today because now she wasn't keeping any water or food down. It was quite sad. We drew a bit of blood from her to measure her platelet count again. Dr. D had a private conversation with the owner...so I'm not sure what they discussed or what the next step will be for poor Ashley.

A couple of weeks ago we had some feeder mice come in from a pet store. They'd been beat up by another mouse on a rampage in the cage. We checked them out and treated them with antibiotics. Today, one of the mice (the one that had the worst scab) returned. Dr. D thought there were ways we could handle the ugly wound but the pet store didn't want to invest that much money into him so we had to euthanize him.

We also had a puppy come in...this case was quite sad. She was a Christmas puppy for a kid. She was a cute little tan and white mix of some sort. In any case, she was suffering from distemper. The family said they'd taken her to the Vet when she had a cough and that the Vet diagnosed her as having kennel cough. However, a couple of days later, the puppy began have tremors and convulsions and was throwing up so the owners brought her to our Vet. Within an hours time at our place, she was having seizures. It was determined that she was most likely suffering from distemper and that it was progressing so fast that the little treatment we can do for distemper (supportive care) probably would not have saved her life. (Sidenote: I will update with information about distemper at a later date.) I'm not sure what happened later on in the day but I'm fairly certain that the puppy had to be euthanized.