Thanks for stopping by! Get The Way of Cats, delivered, by asking for my RSS feed. Get my free cat advice newsletter by signing up here and get the FREE eBook, Ten Cat Tricks (Every Human Should Know.)Three Thursdays this month I will be featuring a segment from a three part essay from S.H. Jacobsen, who spent a vacation in animal rescue.
On surgery days my friend would start answering telephone messages and making sure the OR was ready while I scooped the poop and did other chores. A bit later the veterinarian would arrive and patients would be dropped off. This is not a fancy place, mainly for the pets of low income people and ferals brought in by volunteers, but it works. The animal is given an anesthetic and then the vet operates carefully but efficiently.
This year I learned how to apply surgical glue over the absorbable stitches to help keep the incision closed. I’d then carry the patient to the heating pads in the waiting room and keep an eye on it while it recovered enough to be picked up by the owner.
The anesthetic is a diuretic, especially with dogs, so a few patients would let loose floods of urine, and once, while trying to move a recovering cat out of one carrier into another, I got a mouthful of spray of some mixture of body fluids so I rushed to get a Coke to wash out the taste (it was my third soda of 2008 – ordinarily I am not a soda drinker).
Aside from a few scratches that was the worst of my “wounds”. I now know the proper way to hold a cat while it’s being given its shots (sometimes using thick leather gauntlets). I also broadened my repertoire to include cleaning up cat vomit (it’s not all joy and kittens).
We had one day with seven operations and on two other days thirteen operations were performed on both cats and dogs. At the end of the day we’d be exhausted but it was a good exhaustion knowing that we were helping to make a difference — my friend says there already appears to be a slight drop in the number of ferals in the Fargo-Moorhead area. When I think of the number of kittens and puppies that will not be born to suffer short, miserable lives on the streets (with only a small percentage surviving the brutal North Dakota winters) or euthanised in a “shelter”, I wish there was a PAAWS-like organization in every town and city in the world.
All photos copyright 2008 by S.H. Jacobsen
Read Volunteer Vacations, and Volunteer Vacations, part ii. (Links will work once post is published.)
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