No, really, this post contains stuff that is most definitely not for the squeamish. The very fact that it even occurred to me to put a TMI label on it means quite a bit. I mean, I’m the sort of person who thinks nothing of describing what we took out a dog in great detail at the table (there’s a reason no one ever invites us to have dinner), and have been known to talk about picking maggots out of something while eating rice. When I say it’s TMI, I’m not joking.
If you keep reading and get grossed out, it’s your own damn fault. I tried to warn you.
So I breeze in the back door of the clinic this afternoon, hit my locker, and pop around the corner into the treatment area. And find myself face to brain stem with a patient. Ah, the clever and observant among you say, this is unusual, as the brain stem is normally considered an interior sort of thing. It really oughtn’t be flopping out there in CrazyCatLady’s face. And you clever and observant folks would be correct. I was nonplussed to say the least.
The abnormality with this particular dog was that he didn’t have a body. Then I notice the ER doc and one of the surgeons, all gloved up, wearing safety glasses, and playing with an impressive array of power tools.
Ohhhh, the folks with the rabies suspect finally put the poor thing down. The dog’s vaccinated, but he’s got progressive neurological problems and he bit the owner. By state law, we have to consider him a rabies suspect and send in the tissue samples for testing. The owner, however, doesn’t want us to send the head off. She’s willing to keep the dog alive, even though he’s getting worse, and even though he’s suffering, through the quarantine period rather than have us send off the head. This has lead to a lot of phone calls between us, the owners, and the state lab, with the end result being that even after 10 days, we still have to send in at least the brain.
The owner’s still insistent on getting the head back for burial with the body, so one of the ER docs has offered to do a craniotomy (take off part of the skull), remove the brain and send it off, and then put the resulting mess back together. This is finally deemed acceptable, as long as we reconstruct the head so he doesn’t look too bad.
So I go on about my business in ICU, trying to ignore the shriek of drill against bone (if you’ve ever been in on an ortho surgery, you know exactly the sound I mean) and the muttered curses from treatment. When they’re finally done, I go to fetch the rest of the dog from the freezer. In the back room, I notice something lying by the door that wasn’t there yesterday. Something odd.
It’s…yes, it’s a coffin. Not one of those cardboard burial boxes we send pets home in, but a real, honest to goodness, coffin. It’s big and white and inlaid, and it has handles and a split lid and everything. And it’s fuzzy. And it’s marked with the rabies dog’s name. His headless corpse isn’t in the coffin yet, thank goodness. I didn’t think the local pet cemetary sold coffins, especially not coffins that elaborate.
Later, I mention the coffin to the other night techs. One of them has already gotten the story from the day people. The coffin didn’t come from the pet cemetary. It came from a human mortuary. It’s a coffin designed for a human child. There is a human coffin sitting in our back room. There’s just something indescribably creepy about that. And it’s not just me. None of think anything about the freezer full of corpses next to the coffin, or about the human cemetary next door to the clinic. Hell, sending a headless corpse out the door doesn’t phase us a bit. That coffin, though, that kind of gives us the willies.
Then, while I’m cleaning up the mess left from the rabies dog, a lynx comes in. A lynx. Tufted ears, big feet, sort of spotty, the whole nine yards. Actually, it’s a lynx hydrid. Biggest damn kitten I’ve ever actually touched. It’s trying to die, mostly because its glucose is less than 20.
We don’t have a full complement of people to work on the lynx kitten because another cat (a plain old cat, this time) has had an anaphylactic reaction to contrast media. If we take this cat’s endotracheal tube out, she’ll die. To keep the tube in, we have to keep the cat under anesthesia, which means someone has to sit there and monitor the cat constantly.
After we get the lynx squared away (once we got some dextrose in her, she perked right up), I wind up dealing with a woman with a rabbit. A bald rabbit. With a big thing on the side of its face. Clutched to her bosom so tightly I have to wonder how the poo thing can breathe. She doesn’t want to hand me the rabbit. 'Cause, you know, if I take the rabbit back to the exam area by myself, it’ll die. Of course, if she keeps squeezing it like that, it’s gonna die. I don’t know why this rabbit is mostly bald and always has been, and I don’t want to know. Same for the big thing hanging off the side of its face.
And then, at the end of the night, the overnight tech tells me about her neighbor. He’s out of jail now, apparently, even though she didn’t respond to his letter asking for her help getting out. He didn’t know her name, so he sent the letter to “Nurse Young Lady who Lives by Herself.” Apparently God showed him her face, and told him she’d play an important role in his life, despite her working nights and coming home in the mornings. (God must not have told him that scrubs don’t always equal nurse, but you can’t expect God to do everything.)
Overall, it just a really odd night.
