All work and no play makes Viv a dull girl

Since last I blogged, I've been up to my ears in work. I've been working full time six days a week and, like I always feared, I am a workaholic. This wouldn't be such a bad thing except that my family practically runs for the hills when I come home a)because I smell like sh*t/guts/vomit and b)because they know I'm going to talk their ears off about how cool the cases were that we saw in the clinic that day.

I can't help it though! The cases ARE cool! In the last week, I got to see an electrocuted cat, a c-section in a cat, a c-section in a bull dog, a c-section in a cow in which the uterus had fused to all the guts and abdominal wall, a dog that had been run over by a tractor, a whack-load of scouring calves, a cow that had pushed her uterus out her vulva, tons of adorable puppies, a dog with the most disgusting yeast infection EVER in its ears and a cat with its eyeball rotting out of its head.

And that's not all! I got to do some surgeries and suture some animals up and I got to go on tons of farm calls.

As cool as it is though, I have to say that I have been more than stressed in the last few weeks. Adapting to a new job, a new environment and trying to learn as much as I can while trying to use as much of my previous knowledge as possible is definitely no walk in the park. I spent most of the first week feeling nauseous and headachey and then this week, my ulcer started acting up again.

I get really bad when my bosses are around and the two days I've been late so far, my boss met me at the door with a grim expression on his face and didn't even say hi to me when I greeted him. Fortunately, he came round later in the day and I managed not to look like a complete idiot.

I missed my lunch break today and had super low blood sugar so in my braid dead state, I was naive enough to contradict one of the vets in front of a client. He wanted me to inject four times the dose of this drug into a calf and I asked him if he was sure it was the right dose because it seemed like it was four times higher than it should have been. I was right in the end, but the vet wouldn't speak to me for the rest of the day.

The farmers and a lot of the clients are also hard to please. It's like waitressing in a way, only instead of bringing someone a plate of pasta, you're trying to save their animal's life. Alternatively, you are sometimes ending their animal's life. That's the hardest. They've let me do two euthanasias now. One time, the cat just wouldn't die. Eventually, we had to inject the euthanol solution directly into the heart. Fortunately, the client had chosen not to witness the euthanasia. Still, I'm traumatised.

I have my good days and my bad days. Some days I feel like I definitely chose the right profession and nothing could possibly go wrong. Other days, I wonder to myself, "what the hell am I doing in vet med?"

Fortunately, I have more good days than bad days.

I am working again tomorrow so I should probably sign off and eat and sleep if I want to be functional tomorrow. All I seem to do these days is work, come home, eat, and sleep. That's all I have energy for. I feel like I'm wrapped up in this little world of vet med and can't seem to think about anything else these days. It's bad though because while I am doing well at work, everything else in my life seems to be on hold. I've been feeling horribly guilty as my older sister's stagette is this weekend and I feel like I can't be bothered to organize and get excited about it. I'm even starting to resent the fact that I have to be in California for five days for the wedding because I'll miss four days of work for it.

*SLAP!* Get a hold of yourself lass.