Another Week Down

It's been a long week.

Big dog managed to impale himself on a stick while we were playing fetch in the off-leash park last weekend. One sleepless night and an early morning trip to the vet later he was diagnosed with a wound infection. Since the vet had to sedate him to explore the wound, I actually called in sick to spend the day looking after him. I blame Mr. Couz, who was still visiting his family, for not coming home early to be with our poor injured dog. When I suggested this to him, he called me a crazy dog lady.

The next day the snow started to fall. I got in the car to make the 1 hour commute to my family practice, and made it all of 8 blocks before turning around and coming home. Good call, since by the time the snow stopped falling about 60cm had fallen on my town. More had fallen on the town where I practice. It was not a good day for commuting. I stayed home and studied for my board exams.

The day after that I didn't even make it out of the house. It was a Snow Day-- capital "S", capital "D". People were being told to stay off the streets, and even the malls were closed down. I stayed home another day, leaving the comfort of my couch only to join my husband in shoveling out our front path, our sidewalk and our cars. Considering that I live in a part of Canada where this kind of weather is really not the norm, this was an event. The fact that the snowbanks are as tall as I am brings me back to my childhood faster than a Raffi song.

The next morning I woke up, ready and willing to go to work. Well, maybe not entirely willing... my throat was scratchy, I was coughing, and my head hurt. I am *not* impressed. A month after getting over URTI #1, URTI #2 hits. Ugh. I guess I should be happy it's not a gastro. But how I managed to get sick the one week I wasn't in contact with patients (unless I caught it from a dog) is beyond me. But I couldn't very well take another day off when I had already missed more than half the week, so I dragged my germ-y butt into work and saw a steady stream of patients with the same symptoms as I had. Seriously... if there was a cure for the cold, don't you think I would have used it on myself?

And in spite of the copious amounts of time I've had to sit around with my laptop and a cup of green tea, readers may have noticed a lack of blog postings recently. I've been hit with... The Block. It must be a midwinter blah thing. I can't come up with anything worth talking about, and when I try to force it I manage to create posts that ramble on for pages without actually making a point. So I stopped trying.

So that's it for my random thoughts from this week. At least I made it until the weekend. Hopefully this week will be better-- my last week in my community family practice. Sigh.

So apparently my dogs listen when I talk about work. I got home from my ER shift today to learn that my puppy has an infected eye that had been angry-looking and swollen shut all day. My wonderful spouse had already made a vet appointment.

The verdict? Anterior uveitis. You have to be kidding me. See picture below (two posts ago). Only in a dog-eye. Now since we're pretty sure my dog doesn't have ankylosing spondylitis (and I don't know enough about uveitis in dogs OR humans to really know what else causes it) we have no idea how it happened. She might have an allergy that set it off, she might have been exposed to something while we were at the Conservation Area yesterday, she might have had blunt trauma to the eye (possibly in the form of older dog's tooth while they were wrestling this morning)... who knows? But she definitely had cells and pus in the anterior chamber, she was markedly photophobic and her pupil was fixed and constricted. Lovely.

So as was the case with my patient last week (minus the stat opthalmology consult)... atropine drops q4h for 24 hours, then q8h, then q12h, then daily to keep the pupil dilated. Steroid ointment on the same schedule, but then twice daily for a grand total of EIGHT weeks. And the puppy is NOT impressed. But at least she won't be going blind in her left eye anytime soon. We hope.

So here's what anterior uveitis looks like in a 7-month-old puppy.


If life continues to imitate work I expect to be extracting a quarter from my dog's nose next week.

Murphy's Law of Blogging

The number of things that you have in your head to write about is inversely proportional to the amount of time you have to spend writing. A few weeks ago, when I was full of ideas, stories and opinions, I didn't have two minutes to rub together. This week I'm on vacation and have nothing BUT time... and can't think of a damn thing to say. Sigh.

So instead of pithy commentary on the world of medicine, here are some gratuitous dog pictures. Pretty soon, I'll be giving Stacie (my favorite dog-blogger) a run for her money.

Random Thought of the Day

I waste far too much time wondering what my dog is thinking about.