Goodbye Dear Sweet, Gentle, Handsome Moose

I was working in the hospital this morning when Moose came in hit by car and died. He had massive internal injuries and possibly a broken back.

He had been up on Mr. Right's land with IntrepidHomeImprovmentMom and had run after her other dog who had escaped an electric fence and went onto the highway. It all happened in the blink of an eye. It's one of those freak accidents that makes you wonder the unanswerable questions about life-- why do good things happen to wonderful animals (or people)?

It was a huge shock to everyone. IntrepidHomeImprovementMom was very protective of her dogs and always made sure the fence gate was shut and did frequent perimeter checks of the fence at home. Sometimes freak accidents happen and it doesn't make any sense.

He was my favorite dog in the house. So happy all the time. So incredibly good looking-- he was huge for a Boxer and had the nicest face.

I will miss him terribly as will everyone else.

So Much Light and In Love With The World

Above: Every Saturday morning I go to the farmer's market and every Saturday this fall it has been sunny and I have spent minutes just admiring and photographing the glowing light-infused honey. This morning was especially beautiful.

It's been a long time since I've been really truly happy. A long time since I was able to be fully present in the moment, although there are times in my life that I have been much better about mindfully living and not worrying so much about the past or the future.

I realized upon returning to school this year, after having such a difficult time adjusting to moving across the country last year, that I was actually happy this fall.

There's a passage in Sara Greenslit's _The Blue Of Her Body_ that captures how I've been feeling lately, especially today:

Lovely. The fields are butter, the trees.

The light, so much light, now lower, hits the trees at leaf-level.

She is in love with the world at these moments. She sustains the present tense, briefly. The sound of driving over leaves. Light, and be lit. This moment is good enough.

Block 4: Off To A Rollicking Start

Monday morning started with me sleeping through my alarm. Really. On the first day of the semester. Off to a great start already. Luckily I naturally wake up early, around 7, so I wasn't late for class.

I had a dream Sunday night that I had a bad outbreak of a nasty virus that has turned out to be the subject of several lectures this week. A rather strange coincidence that my dream portended the subject of the virology lectures.

Just because I made it to class did not by any stretch of the imagination mean that I was awake. In the second lecture of the day one of my classmates asked the professor to slow down so he could copy his slide. I had no idea why since we had been given notes that were an exact copy of the lecture slides.

It was only last night that I realized this is what was written under innate immunity on the second slide:

h17ct klllng
hi nlkzti n
hn 1kc c kti n

And this on another slide:

k117lzktkv 7 c
k1h7t k 1c h 17c 71
1 h kl c 71

Needless to say I had to copy this section of the notes from a classmate! I guess that's what happens when I don't read the notes before class and am not awake for class. Not sure how the letters got all scrambled but that was quite confusing gobbledygook.

The amount of material in this block is, as promised by upperclass students, completely overwhelming. And very detailed. For example, in this same soluble protein lecture in the innate immune system series mentioned above, there is a sentence in the section on lactoferrin that says:

Contains a loop structure with a basic α-helical domain whose primary sequence is very similar to frog magainins.

Frog magainins??? Thank goodness for google! A frog magainin is an antimicrobial peptide. Who knew? And do I really need to know this level of detail to be a good practitioner? This is the problem with having researchers lecture to you-- they are so detail focused and not as clinical. Oh well, it's interesting at least.

I remember last year one second year describing her feeling of being overwhelmed in block 4 as feeling like she was lying at the bottom of a swimming pool staring up. This is not inaccurate. I've talked to several of my classmates who haven't even started studying yet because they don't know where to begin. So overwhelmed we're paralyzed. Vet school is fabulous!

On top of block 4, we also have a parasitology class. Both classes have weekly online quizzes. Our professor generously put up a mock practice quiz for parasitology. I got a 2/10. Yikes. I compared scores with my classmates and found several other people who made a 2, one with a 3 and one with a 4. I might have to crank up my studying. Sigh.

More Ithaca Sky

This top one is my favorite. It is a classic Ithaca sky. It is amazing the contrast of greys. You can say it is a grey day, but there are definitely many shades of grey in Ithaca!

And some taken leaving the vet school parking lot:

We've also had some amazing sunsets lately:

Aesthetics Of The Farmer's Market: Your Input Needed

I'm going to print some of my farmer's market photos and frame them and hang them in the kitchen. (Taking photos at the farmer's market has become a relaxing pastime and I even met another woman there taking photos too for the first time this weekend. It was a soothing afternoon diversion after euthanizing Lindy Saturday morning).

These are the three I am thinking of printing as 16x20-- the top two would go on one side and the honey one on the opposite wall which is not as prominent visually.

Of the others, I was thinking about printing five 8x10s-- I have put them in order of my preference from top to bottom but am curious which ones you like best.

Goodbye My Sweet Angel

I euthanized Lindy this morning. It was very peaceful. We tried to do it on my bed but we couldn't place a catheter because she had some weird bleeding diathesis and formed a huge hematoma whenever we poked her. So we took her to the ICU for catheter placement.

I euthanized her in the quiet room reserved for euthanasia. I stroked and kissed her head while her doctor injected propofol and her head slumped into my hand. Then we gave her a massive overdose of barbituates. I didn't expect to cry but I started to tear up and cried the whole way home.

My only regret is that I did not have the strength to let her go a day or two earlier. She definitely had a lot of pleural fluid again on Friday during her echo even though we had tapped her Wednesday night. I am sure it was not comfortable for her to breathe her last days and I regret that I kept hoping she would get better and just couldn't give up that hope until this morning.

She was only 9, but she'd been in renal failure her whole life and so had quite a long life for a renal failure patient. I had been giving her fluids for the past three years, every day. She just hadn't been right this fall, she was so weak and vomited frequently and was inappetant. I felt certain it was her time.

I never did find out what caused the pleural effusion and Lindy to fail as a result. The echo was showed a normal heart with mildly decreased contractility but normal cardiac output, wall thickness and atria size. The other differentials are some kind of cancer (lymphoma, mesothelioma), vasculitis secondary to the uremia or pressure from the pseudocyst on her kidney causing blood to regurgitate back into the aorta and leak that way.
*
Dear Lindy,

I will miss you so much. You were such a sweet cat. You never once tried to scratch or bite me even though I poked you with an 18 gauge needle multiple times a day for years and poked your neck and bladder frequently for blood and urine samples. The worst thing you ever did was wiggle a little when things really hurt, like when we tapped your chest the week you died.

I will miss your deep purrs, how you liked to crawl under the covers and curl up next to my chest at night. The way you curled one side of your lip up in a smile when you were happy to see me. The way you always wanted one part of you to be touching me, whether it was your paw on my leg, your side against my arm or your the tip of your tail just touching my hand.

It is so unfair that you had to suffer so much in life, sweet girl. You were very stoic right up until the end, eating, drinking, grooming, cuddling, going outside to lie in the sun and sitting in the window looking out.

You taught me so much about what it means to care for a sick pet and that will be invaluable to me when I become a doctor and will help me to be compassionate with clients in similar situations. Thank you for teaching me about how important it is to be an astute observer, how even an astute observer can miss the subtle signs of dyspnea and how difficult it can be to make a decision about euthanasia when what is going on is a mystery.

I will miss you and love you always.

HT

Gratuitous Cute Puppy Picture

Me at Felicia's Thursday night for the gay graduate student night with a very cute labrador x hound puppy, only 9 weeks old!