Snow and Ice!

Yesterday was not a fun day to be driving. We had freezing rain, sleet and then snow Sunday into Monday. When I left for work a little after 7:30, the plows had not been out and there was no sand down. Also there was blowing snow across the road. At one point it was white-out conditions, which always makes life interesting...



When you can't see where the white sides of the road end and the ditch begins, life gets a little hairy. The wind was blowing, pushing 'GiGi' sideways but she was getting in the icy grooves made by cars the night before. I admit, I was 6 minutes late for work yesterday. I'm always early! Lunch was in the lunchroom - I had no desire to get out on the road again. Going home was better but still a little tricky. I think people who live in areas like this are sort of proud they don't let a little thing like weather keep them home. I know I'm proud when I make it anywhere! People who live in cities have NO idea...



Oh yes, work. It stayed fairly busy. Mike had a family emergency, Dennis was out with his knee, Jen off, so we had Tom. Mainly we were trying to schedule and reschedule to try to keep things smooth for Tom. When an emergency came up in the country ( a horse choking), we had to call all the appointments to reschedule since we had no doctor in the clinic. Lots of boarding dogs going home. Also Holly and I took pictures of 'Max' outside in the snow to email to his daddy who's taking a group of travelers to Australia and New Zealand. It's summer there so Larry will enjoy seeing his dog rolling in the snow!
Emma's been getting loads of snow in Moorhead. Concordia actually closed school down for the day - which is almost unheard of! Emma and friends took the opportunity to study with maybe a quick break to enjoy that white stuff. The Interstate was closed down too (from blowing snow also). I must admit I would prefer snow outside than the ice we have now.



Emma sent we some great pics but I can't pull them off my phone. If she emails them, I'll post them.
No fun today - Kerry came for the horses but only trimmed Rudy - everyone else was ok for now, which is good since they have cabin fever and I'm not sure Piper would have behaved!

Monday

Monday morning and back to work. By 8:30 I had started getting bags of iron ready to ship, started a mastitis (for a milk bulk tank) culture, checked in the one boarder coming in, helped draw blood from a surgery dog, settled things with my kennel assistant....All in the first hour.
Things got slower from there of course, but it was a hectic start to the week. Mostly worked on shipping in the morning - the iron as well as vaccines (did not have to mix, thank goodness), And a box that included  a gallon of antibiotic (for baby pigs, to be added to drinking water) and more vaccines.
For lunch was the chicken and ham gumbo I made yesterday in honor of the Superbowl in Louisiana last night. It turned out very well!



Do you notice the okra in this picture? Gumbo isn't gumbo without okra!! Of course I had okra in mine too!


 The afternoon was spent checking out the boarders, and filing papers mostly. I get 2 days off this week since I worked on Saturday. Jacky and I got home at the same time. While he went out in the snow to feed the horses and llamas, I went inside and fed the dogs. Traeh, Gertie, Casey and Magic now get a raw food patty that is made of ground up meat as well as bones. I really like this Natures Variety but it is too expensive to feed to all the dogs. We've tried Lamb, Duck, Bison, and Venison. To say it disappears down their throats quickly is an understatement.



 The others get a grain free dry food (Canidae this time) with raw ground turkey. They do eat quite well in this house. Little ZuZu's coat is starting to get soft and shiny. She still needs to put on a little weight but we don't want her to go too far the other way!






The kittens got to be outside for the afternoon but they were waiting when we got home. Right now they're hiding under a blanket on the floor, moving it all around. After a long nap, they are wide awake but soon will have to go in the cat cage for the night. We need to get a little sleep at night! The poor horses and ponies haven't been out for days because it's too slippery. At the clinic we've had a couple of people call with horses down from the ice. At least one of them had to be put down. Since the barns are on the top of hills, the horses and ponies have to be on slippery slopes to go in and out. Too dangerous right now.

I'll try to get a little house work done tomorrow. See you then!

Kittens are back!

Yep, the title is kittens are back. Yesterday was a rough day. When Jacky got home at noon, the kittens had wrecked (more than usual) havoc in the house. My philodendrum was gone, the water all over the hutch, the poor beta fish "Flame" barely in enough water to stay wet (kind of like Dr. Seus's Thing One and Thing Two). Jacky did what anyone in that situation would do, he threw the kittens in the barn and went back to work.
When I got home, I immediately missed my boys and walked down to the barn to ask Jacky if he had brought them there. The problem was I couldn't find them. And it's cold outside! The boys are only about 4 months old and have been in the house since I started bottle feeding them. Usually when I transition a cat to live outside, I do it in stages so they don't freak out and run off, can find the food and water, and I do it when the weather's good! I was so afraid all night. I walked around in the dark calling them, checked the barn several times, went to bed early and cried. I was sure they were dead - or would be soon since they weren't in the barn and had no protection from the cold. Jacky went back out and checked too with no results.
This morning I watched Jacky leave after he let the horses and llamas out - no kittens. "Flame" the beta fish was happier since he had water to swim in again. Later in the morning I went out with the dogs to clean stalls, calling for the kittens. Finally I heard one - above the milk house. Had to get the steps to reach him and I couldn't see his brother.  Eventually I heard Eli crying from behind the dog crates in the corner. They must have been there all night but were too scared to answer me. Eventually they both came and helped me clean stalls. I carried them inside since they both were shaking and hungry. I also immediately texted Jacky to tell him he was out of the doghouse....But the kittens will have to start going to the barn during the day. Sorry boys.
Training tonight with Julie and her dog "Moose". It went well - we worked on learning the "stay" command and the "come" command. Moose is coming along but he is a 90# dog that has not learned control yet. Luckily he's very good natured, but has a lot of power when he wants something. Tonight he really wanted to  meet Candy and I had to take the leash from Julie to be a little firmer with him. Eventually I wore him down (I think).
Here's a picture I took yesterday morning. In all the fuss over the kittens, I didn't get a chance to blog like I wanted to. Sunrises and cool weather photo-ops are the only perks to getting up that early. So I try to capture the moment so I remember when I 'm not happy going to work early.



Tomorrow is appointment day. Also a Lunch and Learn so I get free food while a sales rep tells us all about a product they want us to promote. It's strange - I always thought Veterinary Clinics were about medical care for animals and it turns out they're a business first and always interested in what they can sell to their clients. It's very disappointing - finding out how the real world works. At least I get a free lunch.

Saturday

Working today - and I had to open up. Boy it got cold overnight ! Windy, windy, windy so the wind chill was single digits while the actual temp was about 17. I worked with Holly today - that means that although as long person I should be at the front desk, I get to be appointment tech because she's more comfortable at the front. That's ok, I prefer not to answer the phone!
 Before I left though I had to hand walk my new dog "Zoey". She's a miniature dachshund who's been neglected after a divorce. She's about 3 years old and looks just like Uli - except trim where Uli's become a tub. She's also quite a sweet girl - no biter this time! Hurray! The reason she was given up is that she kept pottying on the floor. Jill and I suspected that no one paid attention to her signs and so she had to go inside. Also they wouldn't clean up after her and she was spending her life in a crate. She worked out well when I got her home...a little running around to get away from all the curious noses but she never growled or snapped. Thought the kittens were the best thing ever and it was quite fun watching them take turns chasing each other.



Isn't she cute in Magic's sweater? She was awfully cold today!


Ok, back to work....Mike was the vet to we were kept consistently busy as usual. Mostly vaccinations, ear trouble and 1 ACL recheck for a dog that lives in the cities. The owner saved a lot of money by driving down to Mike to have the surgery done. I mean like thousands of dollars! The husband wanted to put the dog down because it was too expensive. As it was the dog had stretched the ACL repair and Mike wasn't pleased. Told owner to give it another month before they try to repair the other knee. Too bad the dog was such a hyper thing.
The other thing I had to do at work was read a sensitivity. That's where we take a culture we have grown from tissue, milk or blood, and put the organism on an agar plate. We put little paper discs that contain different antibiotics on top of the growth, incubate it overnight, and read the sensitivity the next day. That's the part I did this morning. I have to measure and compare numbers to find out which antibiotics will work on the organisms.


The discs have antibiotics such as Amoxicillin, Penicillin, Trimeth Sulfa, Nuflor....This picure shows all discs have as effect on the organisms but that usually isn't the case. I take a small ruler and measure the radius of the clear part and multiply by 2 for the diameter. Then I compare on a chart that gives me resistance or susceptible numbers.

This is another test I checked. If the organism is streptococcus (responsible for strep throat in people) the tube of a agar will turn black. This last tube is a liquid that, if positive for strep, will be clear, not cloudy.


Pretty neat, huh? I like to do this lab work. Mike said this was from a pig producer who was losing lots of pigs. The pigs' skin on the chest was getting edema (fluid inside) and turning purple (from blood under the skin). He said it was the nastiest case of strep he had ever seen.

Took the afternoon off since it was sooooo cold. The puppies and I are snuggled under the blankets, I've had my hot tea and a nap. Unfortunately I now have to hand walk that stinker dachshund. I say that because this afternoon I let her out without the flexi leash on, thinking it was so cold that she'd potty and run back inside. Right....she liked her hand-me-down purple sweater and thought she'd do some exploring of this neat place. I hurriedly threw on my boots and jacket and rushed out (carefully on the ice!) and caught up with her by the geese. I just was not looking forward to chasing a mini dachshund in a purple sweater through the county in the dark!!!!

Busy,,,

Busy, busy. Yesterday and today were 10 hour work days. I'm not sure how Aren does it week after week. This week is especially bad - working 6 days in a row which is unusual now. I'll go backwards I guess;
Thursday - my surgery day so I start before 7. I had told Brandi to not come in today for kennels since there was only 1 boarder. Of course that meant I had to take care of Isaac myself as well as Festus, my surgery dog. I also had 4 cats up front to take care of. Milo, the 2 year old tom cat had used his litterbox, which is good, but tomcat urine stinks like crazy. I could tell the minute I walked through the door. In order to get the clinic smelling nice again before clients started showing up, I had to do super cleanup fast. Milo's a good boy and was neutered and declawed today to get ready for his new life as a house cat. I hope it works for him since tomcats often cannot stop spraying in the house even after being neutered. Oh well, if he gets booted outside at least he'll be fixed.
Two other kitties - Lilly and Bert, or Roberta, were here to be spayed and declawed. Bert is a cute bluecream kitten, very affectionate. Lilly is a beautiful long haired cat that looks like the Fancy Feast cat on TV.




 Also there was Squirt, a cat that ate chickens bones before Christmas and is having serious trouble due to bone pieces still stuck in her gut. She's ouchy and not happy at all but you do the best you can for her.
That was my surgeries today. There was also a hernia repair on a show dairy heifer (cow).



I helped the client get his cow into the barn but I let Pam help with that one since I was helping Dennis with all the other surgeries. The doctors can do most things by themselves, especially once the animal is sedated, but declaws require a technician to help with the tourniquet as well as holding the toes open for the tissue glue to be dropped in.


This looks similar to our cats after we're done. The cats have bandages on their feet and stay overnight. I will take the bandages off tomorrow morning and watch for bleeding. The cats go home after 10 tomorrow.
One last picture of a dog like Festus:


Festus was neutered today. Nice dog - very muscular and athletic. He lives on a Boer goat farm where I bought some goat kids a couple of years ago. The owners had to put their other boxer down a few months ago and went out and bought another like him.
The afternoon today was spent cleaning up 4 surgery packs, the surgery room, the kennel, checking in surgeries for tomorrow, helping Dennis x-ray Squirt with our new digital x-ray, checking out Festus, helping load back up the heifer...doing kennels after 5 since I had told my kennel person to not come in (silly me)., and sterilizing the packs. Still, not as tired as I was last night when I went to bed an hour earlier after napping on the sofa all evening.
The dogs are starting to feel abandoned...

Let's try again...

                                        HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANNA!!!!



Monday!   Back to the routine. Emma left yesterday so the house is now quiet. Jacky and I have been trying to eat all the extra food in the house so Lori can get that trim figure back again...Lunch was leftover stir fry and supper was stroganof made from leftover beef strips. I used Hungarian paprika and it was wonderful! We both ate too much though.
Not too busy at work. Only 4 dogs were boarding and they left pretty early. I was float and ended up getting together an order for a pork producer. 2 bags of Iron for baby piglets - I had to add Penicillin and Vitamin B (which smells like nutritional yeast and stains your skin orange!). The Vitamin B is an appetite stimulant and iron is for anemia. It's a big problem in baby pigs and expensive. Each bag costs them about $200. I try not to think how expensive some of the product is that I have to mix. Because if I goof up, that's lots of dollars someone has to pay for! I had to get 2 boxes of estrumate (brings females into heat), 4 bottles of oral Vitamin D, 3 gallons of disinfectant and then I had to find a bottle of MJ PRRS vaccine. Finally I had to mix up vaccine. First I thought it was one product that we didn't have enough of. After a couple of hours, Pam was talking to me and we realized it was a different vaccine that had to be mixed up. So I got that all together. It takes me a while because I don't do it very often. I'm always afraid of messing up because each pork grower gets something different. With help, I finally figured it all out and made it up with about an hour to spare.
That took up all morning. Mike was busy with an ACL surgery and I had lots of laundry - still from holidays. This afternoon I was kept busy trying to fix the blood chemistry machines. Pam hadn't been keeping up with weekly maintenance and the machines start refusing to work. She was busy in surgery so I tackled the IDEXX machines and finally got everything taken care of. Helped Mike take x rays of a labradoodle who may have swallowed a rubber ball. When I left work, he and Pam were tackling exploratory surgery to see if they could find that ball.
Had 1 behavioral consult. Wish I could charge money for these! Someone adopted a labradoodle on Saturday and it wants to eat her cats....hmmmm. I told her the 10 month old could be trained but it would take a strong commitment and leadership (as well as a crate). The new owner and husband had already thought about taking the dog back but they did like him. I told her if they kept him I could help with obedience lessons. Called Jill about the mini dachshund Zoey that I might be getting. She hasn't heard back from her husbands cousin so we'll see. This dog has gotten the short end of a divorce and is being ignored. They won't pay attention to her and she has accidents because they're not paying attention to her - and then they yell at her and crate her all day...Jill says she's the sweetest dog. And then Julie called about our private obedience lesson tomorrow and wanted to get a prong collar. I told her to wait since she has a chain training collar which is what I prefer.
My day off tomorrow is not off I guess. I have to go in for training on the new digital xray machine. 3 hours long...last week I fell asleep during training. Maybe I'll be more awake in the morning!
See you tomorrow!

I'm back!

I'm trying to get back here again. Right now I can't put any photos on my blog but, I don't really have the time anyway.
Thursday again. No surgeries so I didn't get to participate in my favorite activity. Next week there's an ACL surgery on my Thursday though so I really really hope they don't move it!
Instead I kept busy with other things. I had to do kennels since there weren't enough dogs to warrant Tony coming out. Max, whose dad is taking a travel group down the Panama Canal (Larry works for a travel agency. His blog is great - http://w.angelfire.com/mn/4seasons/PANAMA12.html ). Also Louie, a chocolate lab who had severe entropion on both eyes and had surgery to correct that Monday. Entropion is where the eyelids turn inwards toward the eyeball and the eyelashes literally rub against the eyeball. It is extremely painful and this poor dog came in squinting. He was also very nervous and growly. After the surgery, which involves cutting out a piece of eyelid and suturing the eyelids, Louie could see again without pain and became a completely different dog. Now he wags his tail and jumps all over me when he sees me. Much better! Sometimes it's not the dogs temperament but a medical condition that makes them aggressive or defensive.
That was all the boarders until Sophie came in. She's an apricot miniature poodle that had a penrose drain in that we had to take out today. The dog had been bitten by a family members dog over Thanksgiving and had a penrose drain put in, which is a rubber collapsible tube that enables serum and infection to drain out of the wound to allow healing to take place. This dog was a rescue who had been adopted last year. A beautiful calm purebred poodle found wandering on the street of Minneapolis. I really don't understand people. I'm glad she found this special lady to love her.
Other things - sterilized bottles of water, sterilized plastic bottles, answered phones, did laundry, changed the outside mercury light, just this and that...
Speaking of dogs....I came home at lunch and found a house full of poo. All 10 dogs ( or most of them) had gone potty while I was at work. Possibly because it was raining (Yea!) this morning and I left earlier than usual since Jacky left at 5:15 and I left at 6:30. So it was dark also. I was not happy at all and had to spend  my lunch hour cleaning the floor. Plus I had to move horses and llamas outside at noon since it was raining when I left this morning. SueBee and Piper had accidently closed the gate which prevented them from going outside. It meant that they were stuck inside the barn while poor Brandy was stuck outside in the rain,. Oh well, everyone survived and Jacky got home at 4:30 so he got to clean up the barns (sorry!).
Jacky fixed hamburger patties on the forman grill tonight. They were very good. Aren sent me a picture of Truely curled up next to Cedric. Looks like they're getting along! That makes me feel good. I love my two kitten boys. It's true nothing is safe, but they come find you when they want to nap, they know their names (Eli and Sambo), and they purr like crazy when you hold them. Must say I'm happier with them today then with the dogs! Hope tomorrow goes better. Night!