It is really freaky that you posted this, because I was going to start a new thread about my job today!!!
Last night/this morning was a shift from hell. For those of you who don’t know, I work animal emergency 3 nights a week (in a row) and my shifts go from 6 PM to 8 AM. I work for a very large specialty practice. During the day we do oncology, dermatology, radiology, ultrasounds, chemotherapy, radioactive iodine, CT scans, special surgeries, you name it, we do it. At night we do emergency work and critical care. We have a special ICU ward for the very ill patients. We are one of the best hospitals in the area and all the general daytime practices use as as their emergency hospital. You can imagine how busy we are. Even when there are no emergencies walking in the door, we have lots of inpatients that need to be taken care of. Two nights a week I am the critical care technician. It is very stressful ,which is why I am not critical care on my last night, because I would crash and burn and that would not be a pretty thing to see.
On my nights in ICU, I am not supposed to leave the ICU ward for one second, unless I have someone come relieve me. I miss a lot of the crazy things that happen to the rest of the staff in the general ward, which is why my posts have dropped off. But last night, every time I poked my head into the general ward, someone was bagging up a pet. We must have euthanized 7 animals, which is actually quite a high number for one night. At least two of those were cats that had urinary obstructions, and the owners chose not to treat. We had to amputate a dog’s broken leg, because it was cheaper to cut it off than it was to do the surgery to fix it. We had another dog come in because he ate a sock, and we went in and got it out with the endoscope. Owners are very happy (and so are we) when we don’t have to cut! In the ICU ward, I had a hit by car puppy, a cat that needed a blood transfusion, a cat with cardiomyopathy, and a cat in respiratory distress that went agonal as soon as it crossed the threshold into the ICU ward. You would have thought you were in a human ER, with doctors screaming for atropine and epi, techs struggling to entubate, setting up the EKG, suction (the cat was full of fluid), chest compressions, and all that other good stuff. This happens at least once a night. We got the cat back but it could not breathe on its own. The owner finally consented to euthanasia.
Around 6 AM we had an emergency of a different sort. The toilet in the bathroom in our lobby overflowed and totally flooded our waiting area. When I say totally, I mean TOTALLY. The water was all over the place and it was DEEP. What a mess.
At 8 AM as I was reviewing cases with the daytime ICU tech, a dog in DIC came in. DIC stands for disseminated intravascular coagulation, but in simpler terms, it stands for Death Is Coming. All I can say is, I am glad I was on my way out the door and that when I have to go back tonight that dog will be in ICU and I will not.
As for that Emergency Vet show on Animal Planet, I watch it sometimes and I find it amusing. Take it from me, there is a lot you don’t see. That show is very carefully edited. They don’t show what animal emergencies are REALLY like. Come spend a shift with me at my job and you will get the real deal. You will watch me deal with a 150 pound down in the rear rottie who has just had blowout diarrhea all over himself, and as soon as I get him cleaned up, I have to deal with the nut job Damnation (you figure it out) that just chewed part of his cath out and is happily bleeding out all over the place, and as soon as THAT is taken care of you can watch me draw blood from a pissed off cat, and that is only in the first 10 minutes of my 14 hour shift.
What REALLY annoyed me last night though, was this article in Reader’s Digest. They had a rather long story in there about emergency vets. They devoted one sentence to technician’s, stating that they draw blood, monitor patients, and clean cages. HELLO?!? True, that is a big part of my job but I think I do a LITTLE more than that!!! Let’s discuss what “monitoring patients” means. In my case it means keeping an eye on several animals, all at once, who are in critical condition and could die at any moment. I have to work very closely with the doctors and act as their right hand because they cannot sit in ICU all night themselves. They rely on me to keep their paitents ALIVE! I have to be able to recognize any variety of problems and respond in an instant. When a doctor hands me an animal and says, “Place a cath, run a CBC, I-Stat 8, VD and lateral thorax rads, hook him up to LRS and bolus 200 mls then start a drip at 40 mls an hour with 20 mEq’s of potassium chloride and 2.5 percent dex,” I have to be able to do all that with only the help of other technicians. So I think I do a little more than monitor patients and clean cages! I am sorry for the long rant, but so few people really know what a tech does and I hate being viewed as a glorified animal restrainer.
Anyway, that’s it for this week’s installment of Animal ER With Michelle. 