March. What a tease. One day, it's warm enough to consider getting out the shorts and sandals; then some time during the night a weather front roars through and when you wake up it's spitting snow: one final bitch-slap from Old Man Winter. Seems as though our yearnings for better weather grow more desperate with each passing year.
But at no time in my life can I remember struggling through this changeable, flirtations month as laboriously as the year I spent most of March on crutches and an air cast. As if March mud doesn't pose enough challenges on two good legs.
"My horse stepped on my ankle and broke it yesterday," I told my family doctor as I was sitting in his examination room, feet dangling off the exam table. He was drawing breath to suggest an x-ray when I wordlessly proffered him the envelope holding the one I'd already taken that morning in my veterinary clinic. No big deal, really - I had calculated the settings, wiped a few stray dog hairs from the machine and took the shot. The only dicey part had been dropping my pants and climbing on the platform without losing my balance, since at the time I was reduced to teetering on one foot and a metal crutch.
He raised his eyebrows and placed the radiograph on the viewer. "Well, you definitely have a fracture," he agreed and reached for his prescription pad. "Now what about some pain medication?" I had already covered that, I informed him, and he sighed, handed me a referel slip for an orthopedic specialist and walked out, shaking his head.
Well, it wasn't that difficult, really. A broken bone is a broken bone, and if I couldn't recognize one with 15 years of veterinary medicine under my belt, I was in trouble.
This business of veterinarians trying to heal their own illnesses and injuries is nothing new. It's not uncommon for an inveterate eavesdropper such as myself (this from long practice of performing operations and keep tabs on one's staff at the same time), at professional gatherings, to hear tales of how one's peers have sutured up their colleagues, treated their own dog bites and cured their children's infections utilizing whatever was at hand in the clinic. I don't believe it's so much a matter of saving money as saving time, but I'm sure it results in no end of exhasperation for their family doctors.
I began to fall prey to this mindset early in my own career. I had just purchased a veterinary practice and needed to have some bloodwork done for insurance purchases, so a phelbotomist assigned by the insurance company made arrangements to stop by my home and draw the sample. I've always held it's definitely better to give than to recieve in any procedure involving needles, so I was looking forward to this ordeal with about as much enthusiasm as I would view impending dental work or an IRS audit. I hoped the needle-wielder would be skilled, and quick.
The technician appeared at my door, took some information and a few vital signs, wrapped a tourniquet around my arm and began tapping the area of the vein crossing my elbow joint and shaking her head in what I've discovered is the universal phlebotomist's sign language for "oh, boy, I'm not gonna hit this one on the first try..."
I tried to make her comfortable. I really did. I joked around that I was a veterinarian and could appreciate a difficult situation; I added that at least I wasn't foaming at the mouth and trying to bite her (well, I thought it was funny). However, after unsuccessful several attempts to collect my blood, which apparently was in no hurry to leave my body, she suggested giving up and calling someone else to give it a try. At this point multiple stabbings were causing my patience to wear a little thin, and the thought of waiting around for yet another appointment was just about more than I could stand. "Just stick me again, and get the job done," I hissed through gritted teeth. I suppose by then my blood pressure was rising because the vessel practically leaped onto the needle and proffered the desired result. It was a good thing; one more failed attempt and I'd have drawn the damn sample myself,and I'm sure I wouldnt' be the first DVM to have done so.
One of the hazards of working in private practice is, as you might surmise, the fact that the veterinarian is subjected to repeated exposure to a variety of diseases. In the close quarters of the average examination room, potential contact with illness is never far away. But forget the animal parasites, never mind bubonic plague or anthrax or rabies; I'm talking about human illnesses. I've lost count of the number of times an owner has placed his or her pet on my exam table in the middle of cold and flu season; the pet is the picture of glossy -coated health but the owner is a pale, clammy, wheezing mess hanging onto the table for support and obviously only a hack away from coughing up a lung. When they can get their breath they will announce, "I've been in bed with the flu but I didn't want Boopsie to miss her appointment." Gee...thanks. I appreciate the loyalty and conscientiousness...but not that much. Some things just don't need to be shared.
Most of the infections that result from such exposure, I'm happy to relate, can be controlled by such medicines as we have on our treatment room shelves anyway, since a large number of them are generics that are available for both humans and animals. However, our attempts at self-medication can occasionally backfire.
One long spring I went through two rounds of what I deemed modern, "big gun" anitbiotics trying to fight off a respiratory infection under my own power. "Why don't you take some erythromycin?" Mom had suggested early on, and I had scoffed at such an "old fashioned drug." One wasted month later, when I had finally dragged myself to the doctor's office at my Mother's insistence he announced "we're going to start you on erythromycin." I was better in two days. Lesson learned: Listen To Your Mother.
On a particularly bad late summer weekend, filled with cases that refused to either die or get better, incisions that pulled open instead of healing, and the failure of a nearby Pretzel Festival to actually HAVE pretzels when I was in desperate need of a junk food fix, I sat in a blue funk at the breakfast table, taking my vitamin, immune system stimulant and...quite by accident...my old labrador retriever Tristan's post-op antibiotic capsules. In this case the drug was a generic that is in general use in the human population but one to which, as I happen to have discovered several years earlier (don't ask), I was allergic to.
I am here to tell you, it is damn near impossible to force yourself to throw up by putting your fingers down your throat if your attitude toward that particular physical function is that you would rather die than do it.
Failing that, I called my nurse friend - this was 7:30 on s Sunday morning - and whined pitifully to her for advice. She laughed in my ear, which for some reason I felt at the time was singularly lacking in compassion, and advised me to "take two benadryl and call the emergency squad if you quit breathing." (It will not surprise you to learn that I did have benadryl in the house - in my stash of animal drugs, of course).
Obviously I lived through that episode though I wasted a large portion of a perfectly good day in front of the TV in an antihistamine-induced stupor, and ultimately suffered the mind-numbing side effect of having a Sunday morning cartoon song playing unstoppably and annoyingly through my head for the next several days.
Then there was the Great Dog Bite Episode. Naturally in my career choice this is an occupational hazard, but while I'd had some near misses, nothing very severe had ever happened to me until I tried to break up a loud and rather violent difference of opinion between one of my own dogs and the neighbor's dog. You know how Your Mother Always Said Never Break Up A Dog Fight With Your Bare Hands? There's a good reaon for that. When I appeared at work the next morning wearing my pajama bottoms because my hand was too swollen for me to zip up my work pants, my long-suffering office manager took matters in hand and sent me to the doctor before I had the chance to try and medicate myself. The bite wound in the area of my knuckle had become infected and threatened to spread to the joint, and as a result I spent several days in the hospital on a combination of intravenous and oral antibiotics and IV fluids.
In the hospital I discovered a whole new aspect of medicine: "the doctor as patient." Man, what a pain in the ass we are! I'm sure I made the nurses' lives miserable when my antibiotics weren't given on time, but they gleefully retaliated by announcing over and over to anyone within earshot - "she's a vet - and her OWN DOG bit her!" My hand healed uneventfully although for some months it was stiff enough that it was difficult for me to make that particular rude gesture which signifies to other drivers that you are the only one on the road with any sense at any given time and in fact DO own the road.
There passed a period of several generally healthy years, until the March day when I slipped in the mud while leading my pony down a steep slope, and provided a landing pad for his rear hoof as he attempted to jump over the ditch and me simultaneously. There was a sharp crack and I remember thinking "boy, I hope that was a stick!" but discovering when I tried to stand up that alas, it wasn't. I lay there in the warm spring sunshine for a short time, while the pony was caught and put away, and thought things through, but ultimately decided against going to the emergency room at the local hospital on a sunny Sunday afternoon where I was sure to share space with victims of chainsaw accidents and kids who'd tried to catch baseballs with their incisors. I crawled up the slope and was helped into the house by a friend, whom I instructed to "bring me a pillow and an ice bag, two big ibuprofens and a shot of whiskey." Hey, the old doctors knew a thing or two about medicinal alcohol. The ibuprofen took care of the pain, the whiskey settled the mildly shockey feelings I was experiencing, and the couch was comfortable. I was good for the night, till I could limp into the clinic and xray my aching ankle the next morning.
Later that next day I sat in the orthopedic specialist's office. A radiology tech approached me and said "I can't believe you took those xrays in a veterinary clinic!" I braced myself for a lecture and said "Oh really? Why not?"
"Because," he said, "you wouldn't believe the junk we get from some doctor's offices. Your x-rays, however, are excellent!"
Once in a while it's nice to be vindicated.
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