I'm fine.

John Bridger: How do you feel?
Charlie Croker: [shrugging] I'm fine.
John Bridger: Fine? You know what "fine" stands for, don't you?
Charlie Croker: Yeah, unfortunately.
John Bridger: Freaked out...
Charlie Croker: Insecure...
John Bridger: Neurotic...
Charlie Croker: And Emotional. 

 - The Italian Job

With the above definition, I have mostly been "fine" on this rotation. I'm either freaked out about a procedure I have to do (often with the client watching me), insecure about my answers at morning rounds, neurotic about over-analyzing my patient exams (is this normal? ooh, that's up a little, do I need to worry about that? why is his AST down??!), and emotional because either something fantastic has just happened or something horrible. 

Large animal medicine is almost over. Which means almost six weeks of my fourth year is over. This is has been substantially different from my first three weeks on fish health.

Namely, patients die.

Okay, fish die too. But it's just less emotional. From a welfare/lab animal perspective, fish suffering is no different from any other animal suffering. But whether it's societal conditioning, or just the difference in management (after all, I wasn't setting up IV lines and doing ultrasounds on the fish and the fish didn't have humans attached and names and stories),  for me it's just plain sadder when a non-fish dies. (Your mileage may vary.)

People often comment to me, "Oh, I don't know how you can stand it! I just couldn't put an animal to sleep." To be honest, that's not the part that bothers me. Sure, it's sad. I screamed like a baby when my dogs were put down. I am moved seeing a clients' animal euthanized. It's a goodbye, of course it's sad. But 9 times out of 10, it's in the animal's best interest. In vet med, we can do what (most) human doctors can't. We can end suffering once and for all. We can take the pain away.

What gets me are the ones we just can't save.

Maybe we just don't know what they have. Maybe we know what they have, but we just get them too late. Maybe they just go overnight. I can't go into specifics on this blog, but we've had a rough couple days in large animal medicine with a few deaths; things that just couldn't be helped. When I came in this morning, I asked a classmate about a patient who came in yesterday. He told me he died overnight. It turned out to be a fluke thing that no one could have anticipated and even if they had, there was nothing that could have beeen done about it. But it didn't change the fact that I got irrationally angry at the universe and stood in that stall and cried. Not long, but I did. Then there was stuff to do. There's always stuff to do, but sometimes, you just need that five minutes in a dark stall to let it pass, so you can get on with the patients that are still alive and still need you.