Holy crap, a new post!!!!

I know it has been a while . . . sorry about that. Things all sort of blur from one day to the next and it doesn't seem like there is much interesting stuff to talk about. I kept meaning to post stuff, but it all seemed like more of the same stories over and over again and I just didn't feel like finding new ways of writing the same thing again. To cover the last six-plus months in a nutshell, I am still at the Garden. I have a new coworker named Deb and Jake is still there too. A lot of dogs have been adopted, some have been returned. The fall and winter have been very hard on DogTown, we have lost quite a few dogs and one dearly loved coworker. There are a lot of new faces in DogTown and several of the people I thought would be here forever have moved on to other things. It is weird to look around the staff room at meetings and realize how many people have come and gone in almost two and a half years. Day-to-day it seems like nothing ever changes around here but when I step back and look around, it seems like almost nothing is still the same.
So here is the promise I will make to whoever might still be checking this blog, I am not going to make any more promises to post blogs more regularly. I feel bad when I don't meet those promises, so, what I will do is tell you that when the mood strikes me or I have something interesting (for me) to write about, I will post. I have a few pretty exciting things coming up in the next few months, so hopefully - but no promises - I will have some inspiration to write.
It is in this spirit that I find myself writing today. As you might remember, last May a dog named Akila bloated and I was able to stay late and observe her surgery (it was only two posts ago). Not long after that evening, I asked about the possibility of spending a day observing in surgery. Immersion days are a perk of working at BF. If your managers will approve it, you may request to do an immersion day in pretty much any department at the sanctuary that interests you. It is a paid working day but instead of doing your regular job, you get to go see what it is like to do somebody else's job. It is especially nice for the people with office jobs that might not get to spend a lot of time with the animals. In DogTown, our managers encourage us to try and take immersion days occasionally. When they started talking about it, I immediately asked if I could spend a day in surgery. Construction on a clinic expansion was just beginning, so they weren't able to schedule it until this week. When they told me I was finally going to be able to do it, I had almost forgotten about it.
On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in the clinic observing surgeries and helping to prep and recover surgery patients. In the morning, they did two spays and five neuters on dogs and then after lunch they amputated a feral cat's front right leg.
The spays and neuters were very interesting. One of the dogs had some kind of infection in her uterus, so after it was removed we took some samples from it to make sure it wasn't anything serious. I won't get too graphic here, but let me just say it was very cool and very gross all at the same time! Two of the neuters were "crypt orchids" meaning that one or two of their testicles had not descended. One was a double crypt orchid, his testicles were basically where they were supposed to be except they hadn't ever dropped. The other one had one testicle that had descended and one that had actually migrated up into his abdominal cavity so the vet student doing his surgery had to look around for it a little bit. She had a lot of guidance from the vet, so she was able to find the testicle very quickly and the surgery went quite well.
The feral cat had injured his leg and it couldn't be saved (we do know what happened but it is rather graphic, so I will spare you the mental image). The amputation wasn't really that bad to watch, it was pretty cool actually. They did what is called a scapulectomy, meaning that they removed the entire leg including the scapula. This means they weren't doing any drilling or sawing of bones; they basically disarticulated the shoulder by cutting all the soft tissue that holds it in place. To be honest, the worst part for me was seeing the injury before they started the amputation, it had been a day or two since he was injured so the wound looked pretty nasty.
All in all, it was a very interesting day. The people with whom I worked were great and they really let me feel like I was part of the team for the day. I learned a lot and I would love to go back and do it again sometime.