Summer in a Nutshell (very small and squished?)

And I’m back again! So for a summary of my life to date – college ended at the end of June and I worked in Cambridge at a large animal vets for 2 weeks. That was good fun – they let me do things and get good experience there. After that I spent 1 week at a PDSA hospital in Sussex, staying with my Nan. That’s obviously small animals and is very different to the type of small animal practice I used to work in.

Me and H were chatting yesterday and neither of us are totally convinced we agree with PDSA – values seem a little skewed there. They spend many hours on expensive life saving operations yet can run out of essential sundries like needles or paper towels. However my experience with them was more positive that H’s – my place only fell down on a few points in my eyes whereas it made up for that by spending time on almost every animal that came in (even tiny birds and baby wildlife were given top notch care). I shall continue to sit on the fence.

So after that week I spent 2 weeks at my local vets – 7 min walk down the road, fabulous! I managed to get all of my animals vaccinated and treated for their various illnesses (see later) which was handy.

Then I spent 10 days in the French Alps with my family, which was fantastic. I had a few days off after that and then it was back to the PDSA for a second week. It was better this time – I got to do some consults at the end and was really getting into the swing of it! We raced back home on Friday night (last Friday) as I had a wedding to go to yesterday.

The wedding was fantastic – H was up from Bristol and K was there. I was driving which did mean that as the evening went on I was getting more sober and they were getting more drunk – quite hilarious. One woman spent about 10 minutes in the loo telling me that Tesco shoes were so rubbish she’d be better off with bare feet like me. Interesting information but somewhat limited in value. Didn’t tell her my shoes cost more than the rest of my outfit. The food was gorgeous – and the cake was white chocolate! Oh yes. Yum indeed. Lu looked gorgeous – floaty skirts that extended her personal space a lot and a corset thingy. And her hair was all lovely and “old fashioned”, as she put it. I did have a few Bridget Jones moments – sitting on a table with four couples :plain: all discussing how they met. Smug couples. Weren’t so smug later when the blokes all fell asleep mwahahaha! :p

I’ve had a fun few weeks animal-wise. As you know from previous posts, the bunny has encephalozoonosis. Luckily she’s “in remission” now – I have a store of panacur wormer to attack future bouts. The girl cat is now 50% bald and has been put on kitty anti-depressants to stop her self mutilation. Snooglybum, my boy cat (not his real name, just the one I use to embarass him), has his fourth skin infection of the year. Took him to the locum vet who was, in my opinion, totally pants and gave him steroids and antibiotics. I asked for a specific antibiotic because I was going away and my Dad would have to medicate him, and the cat adores those ab’s. The vet said he’d prefer to use other ab’s but would use the ones I wanted. He then gave me the drug I wanted but in a different tablet form. Which, guess what, the cat doesn’t like. Pointless.

On the same day I took my guinea-pig in – he’d stopped eating. Locum vet gave me about 2 days worth of very dilute antibiotic (Baytril). I was irrate. What a waste of time! As one of the vets at PDSA quipped – apparently he has a “Baytril deficiency” *sardonic expression*. If I’d not acted off my own back that animal would be dead now – starved to death. As it was I syringe fed it sugar water, blended food, crushed human vit C tablets and baby food and now it’s eating fairly well again. It’s stupid that there are people treating exotics that haven’t got a clue what they are doing. *sighs* This makes me even more intent to be a exotics specialist and actually *help* exotics rather than just give them flavoured water and send them home.

Ok, I’ll stop whinging now 😉

And so now I’m back home. I have a project to write up and some questions to create for college but other than that I’m a happy free agent for 4 weeks. I plan to decorate my room – dunno how successful that’ll be as I have to do a major declutter. Wish me luck!

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