More animal emergencies?

Hey, Michelle, I miss the Animal Emergency threads! I greatly admire your job (and your attiude), and your stories were always great to hear. You do put up with a lot of crap and heartbreak, but there’s so many marvelous stories you’ve shared as well. (I’ve also become recently addicted to Emergency Vet on Animal Planet. :slight_smile: )

How’re things going?


“Me fail English? That’s unpossible!”

“English? Who needs that? I’m never going to England.”

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. :slight_smile:

Hey, I can appreciate what you do. When my cat’s face started to swell up I let it go for a day, thinking he got into it with a bee (all my animals do this for some insane reason) but it got bigger and I had to take him in.

The technicians were the ones holding my hand, explaining everything to me, getting him set up for surgery. He had an impacted tooth and then more bad news; he has FIV. They gave me lots of information and options.

He’s doing very well now, recovered right away since I did the pre-surgery screening and paid more for fluids during surgery. All in all a 300.00 thing but I didn’t balk about it because he’s never really cost me a lot of money and I love him. Even though he’s the biggest whiner in the world (a very vocal siamese mix) I’ve had him for almost 10 years.

I have since found out all my cats have FIV and there isn’t a lot I can do but keep them away from other cats so it doesn’t spread.

Oh, yeah, my point? The vet spent a total of 10 minutes with me but the technicians spent almost an hour. I’m not knocking the vet but I have a feeling it’s the technicians who do the bulk of the work. I appreciate you and so do my animals!

Last night we treated a dog that had been butchered with a machete.

Please keep your posts coming…I am fascinated by the non-sanitized version (I watch a lot of Emergency Vets) of your job!

I have to ask: how do you keep emotional balance when someone brings in a mutilated animal? How can you be patient with the humans who neglect or abuse the animals?

Ditto was Eden said! As an animal lover and pet owner I really have respect for what you do. But how do you handle the emotional?

ACK! Michelle, dare I ask how the dog is? And how you are?

I do figure I am getting a sanitized version of E.R. life on the TV show; not just sanitized about the animals’ cases themselves, but of the interreactions among personnel. Still, it’s neat. :slight_smile:

Nevertheless, I couldn’t handle the rerun from last night of the kitten born with her insides on the outside. The poor little “mew” it gave when they cleaned it off with antiseptic…and the fact that surgery was useless as the mother abandoned it and it froze to death. :stuck_out_tongue:

I think I’d cry every day if I had your job. You’ve got an impressive composition, girl! Kudos to Michelle! Rah! Rah! Rah!


“Me fail English? That’s unpossible!”

“English? Who needs that? I’m never going to England.”

The emotional side of the job is very hard. It still breaks my heart to have to put puppies and kittens to sleep, especially when it is for no good reason. The abuse and negelct I see on almost a nightly basis is amazing. Animals come in emaciated, flea ridden, flithy, with all manner of diseases so far progessed you can’t even believe the pet is still alive. Most of the time the owners of these pets are totally cluless as to their pet’s conditions. It astounds me how ignorant some people can be. Worse yet, the owners make the staff out to be the bad people, because we actually expect money in return for making their pets better. I know the cost of treatment can be high, especially when you go to an emergency hospital, but why the heck didn’t they take better care of their pet in the first place? The staff tries very hard to deal with these people as pleasantly as possible, but sometimes fights do break out. In really severe cases of neglect or abuse, we will have Animal Services intervene and take the pet away. Venting to other staff members also helps to alleviate the stress. Funny though, when I was at the doctor last week, she told me my blood pressure was high. Never had a problem with thtat before this job!

The machete dog did well, by the way. The dog only got whacked once, and although the cut went down to the bone, and actually chipped part of the bone away, no vital organs were injured.

WHY? Why on earth would you go after your own dog with a machete? Or was it someone else? God, that just really freaked me out when I read it.

“butchered with a machete” and “whacked once with a machete” conjure up completely different mental images for me.

Micelle, for what it’s worth … I’ve had animals around me all my life and I’ve been through a number of trips to animal emergency. I have never complained about the bill, if it’s been higher than what my normal vet would have charged, I write it off to the fact that I could show up in the middle of the night and people like you are there to take care of the problem. My Sheltie (as in: brainless dog that I saved from the animal shelter because his previous owners didn’t have a clue as to what a dog actually was) has had his share of stuuuuupid adventures but I’ve gladly paid whatever it took to get him back on his feet (and mouth). The other bizzare little dog, the cat … let’s just say that I’m with you. Keep up the good work, don’t let the idiots get you down, most of us pet owners are actually fairly responsible.

Thanks for being there at 3 AM,
-E-

Exactly how many times do you have to be hit hard with a machete before you consider it being butchered??? This dog shouldn’t have been hit even ONCE. The wound, although there was just the one, was very serious in that it went down to the bone, chipped part of the bone away, and did serious tissue damage. That one wound took quite some time in surgery to patch up, and will take a long time to heal.

ANYWAY, it was not the owner who attacked the dog, it was a neighbor. There are conflicting stories as to what happened. The dog (a six month old large mix) supposedly attacked a child. The police were involved but they did not take possession of the dog or anything like that.

Many people are callous, self-centered assholes, and that’s a fact.

Near midnight one night this week, some jerk hit a dog with his car, right outside my apartment. There was a bang and a yelp, and then tires squealed as the dick ran away.

Fortunately, not everyone is an asshole. By the time I found my shoes and got outside, there were already a dozen people on the street, in various states of undress. Before two minutes had passed, the dog was wrapped in a blanket and on his way to the emergency vet.

It was heartening to see spontaneous compassion from so many people, but I’m still angry at the thought that somebody could hit an animal and not care.


Of course I don’t fit in; I’m part of a better puzzle.

I got called in tonight because we were really busy. We had two dogs come in at the same time, hit by cars. One was a mean rottie, who promptly bit another technician and sent her to the human ER. The other hit by car was a DOA. We got a call from a woman who had her house robbed, and the robbers slit both her dog’s throats. The dogs never came in, they must have died before she could get them to us.

Last weekend we had a dog brought in, flat out, urinating pure blood. The dog’s coat was dirty and matted and it had fleas. Its teether were rotten. It had cataracts. Its ears were infected. The dog was very painful in its abdomen and was suffering. Due to financial constraints, we couldn’t do any of the diagnostics we wanted to. The owners refused to euthanize. We sent the dog home on antibiotics. The next night, the dog was back, in the ICU ward, getting a blood transfusion. Guess they managed to come up with the money after all. Its amazing how watching a pet suffer and die slowly will change things.

I just wanted to post back here and let everyone know how cool Michelle is. I Emailed her about a weird little stinky thing my cat was doing; she suggested I take him to the vet because his “anal glands may need expressing” and one or both of them might be inflamed. My response–cats have anal glands?? And, well, yes. Yes they do. Hopefully, you’ll never notice them like I did. :stuck_out_tongue:

Well, I brought Inigo in yesterday–and wha-la, his right anal gland was badly clogged and inflamed. Poor kitty! Poor super stinky kitty–when the vet drained that thing, the smell was most ungodly. I felt like such a neglectful mom–he’s had this problem for several months. I just always attributed it to him being a male; I thought it was urine that had a muskier “male” scent. WRONG! He’s on antibiotics now and has been sleeping almost nonstop for 24 hours.

When I brought him in, I explained what Michelle had said might be the problem. After the exam, the vet said cheerfully: “Tell your vet tech friend she was absolutely right–inflamed anal gland.”

Whoo hoo! Michelle, you are a great source of support, information/insight, and understanding of the entire veterinary profession. I thank you, and Inigo thanks you, too! :smiley:

::blushing madly:: Thanks for the kind words! Now everyone knows if they have a problem with their animal’s butt, they can come to me for help! :slight_smile:

So now I feel bad for complaining, but I need to vent: I am sick of doing critical care. I blew a gasket last weekend while working in ICU. I think I scared all my co-workers. I told the night time manager that I wanted out of ICU and I wanted out now! Some nights in ICU are ok, but there are many nights when I am up to my ears in critical patients, and I cannot take care of all of them alone! To make matters worse, not everyone on staff is trained to work in ICU, so even when someone comes in to help me, they don’t know what to do and I have to show them everything. This does NOT help me. I need someone who can walk in, grab an animal, and know what to do. Last weekend I had nine patients. Three were on oxygen. One was a seizure watch, and he seized several times over the night. One was a congestive heart failure, who ended up arresting and dying. Another patient was a 130 pound Great Dane recovering from GDV surgery. He was on 260 mls/hr IV fluids, and refused to pee outside. He would lay down in his cage and urinate all over himself. Have you ever seen how much a Great Dane can pee? Have you ever had to deal with a urine soaked Great Dane every hour? I had 2 hepatic lipidosis cats who needed feedings through an NG tube and a PEG tube. Very time consuming. The seizure dog, when not seizuring, would flip about in his cage and rip his IV line out. I must have fixed it 5 times over the course of the night. The Dane ripped his line out once or twice as well. I got to the point where I just could’t take it any more. I started yelling at everyone. I don’t know how they are ging to fix this problem, but they better get it fixed because I am not putting up with nights like that anymore. If they want to keep me in ICU they better give me a raise AND get another tech trained to help me.


“Love given when it is inconvenient is the greatest love of all. Kindnesses that are shared at a high cost to oneself are the most dear.”

Don’t know who said it, but I like it.

Oh, something sad I forgot to mention while I was ranting about ICU:

A few months ago we repaired a broken leg on a baby deer. After the deer was stable, it was adopted by a children’s wildlife program called Nature’s Classroom. They called us a week ago to report that the deer, named Bam-Bam, died in a freak accident. Seems that Bam-Bam got spooked by a thunder storm and bolted into a glass door. He broke his neck and died immediately. :frowning: All of us at the hospital took it hard. Bam-Bam was a real cutie.


“Love given when it is inconvenient is the greatest love of all. Kindnesses that are shared at a high cost to oneself are the most dear.”

Don’t know who said it, but I like it.

Hey! Michelle needs a group hug! C’mon, everyone, join in…

{{{{{{{{{{{MICHELLE}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}

And here, have some tea c{_} . I’d give you cookies, too, but I can’t seem to make them look right. But they’re there. Really.

Michelle, it sounds horribly, ickily stressful. Is there any hope of getting out of ICU? And are there any happy stories you’ve had that you’d want to share–or is ICU the complete nightmare it sounds? It sounds like it must be terribly discouraging, and outright painful. I once again need to say I admire your constitution.

Hang in there, Michelle…I’ll try and get that massuese over tomorrow. Meanwhile, make sure your pets at home give you some extra affection. :slight_smile:

I don’t know if there is any hope of getting me out of ICU. I spoke to my manager tonight, and he spoke to HIS supervisor, and so far no answer has come up. I told my manager that I was not going to accept, “We’re working on it,” for very long. I refuse to be strung along from week to week waiting for a solution. I mean, I supposedly have this oh so special job being an ICU tech, but I get NOTHING as far as compensation, nothing to make me WANT to stay an ICU tech. I do three overnight shifts in a row. I work all weekend long, every weekend. I work the crappiest position, no one wants to do ICU. But my pay isn’t any higher than anyone else’s, and I don’t get the support I need from the rest of the staff in order to do my job well. In fact, ICU schedules were recently revised, and my hours got cut, from 42 to 38, which results in me taking a cut of 50 bucks a week! Anyway, I got really mad at my manager, and told him that he better figure out something fast, because I am very close to walking out.

Job update–a compromise was reached. I now work critical care one night every other week. The rest of the time I help with inpatients and procedures. I am much happier!


“Love given when it is inconvenient is the greatest love of all. Kindnesses that are shared at a high cost to oneself are the most dear.”

Don’t know who said it, but I like it.