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After a fun but stressful day in surgery, I was looking forward to working in receiving. Our morning orientation for receiving duty focused primarily on paperwork, of which there was a boatload. All the aspects of the physicals we were to give the animals had to be carefully documented. All pertinent directions to the clients, as well as all shots given, had to be documented for them. Rabies certificates had to be filled out. All prescriptions had to be written out. And all of this had to be done in conjunction with client greeting and interaction, putting together vaccines and administering shots, and doing any necessary lab tests. Suddenly the sense of relief I felt from the stress of surgery was quickly wafting away. (more…)

They want you to be prepared when you volunteer for a Rural Area Veterinary Service (RAVS) trip. In preparation for a trip you have to go over page after page of instruction on subjects such as surgery, anesthesia, patient and client interaction, and general procedures. And after reading all this and absorbing precious little, you have to pass an on-line test or you lose your spot. And then there is “the test.” On the first day of RAVS, which is a set up and introduction day, you have to take a suturing test under the scrutiny of Dr. Eric Davis who is the founder of RAVS. Which is why the four of us who had driven up to Bemidji together (a 4 ½ hour drive) and were staying at a local hotel the night prior were diligently tying knots and suturing together hotel washcloths at 11 p.m. The three “simple” tests were timed, and so far none of us had yet completed the required suturing tasks in the allotted time. If you don’t pass, you can still participate in the spay/neuter/vaccination clinic, but you can’t do any surgery. And as any of us would readily admit, we were perfectly willing to do the many other tasks required to run the clinic, but we were there for the surgery.Eventually we did manage to finish the test under the allotted time, but we were far from consistent and we went to bed knowing that it was still a toss-up as to whether we would be doing any surgery in the coming week.Our ragtag “team” assembled in the hotel parking lot at 9 a.m. on Monday morning. Minnesota was well represented, with three of us from my class and six people from the soon-to-be third years there. Other people came from all parts of the country – well, world, really – with two guys from St. Georges vet school in Grenada, a few from Western University in California, a not-yet-in-vet-school volunteer from France, and two Volunteer vets from Philadelphia, among others. We were greeted by Morgan, one of the RAVS staff veterinarians, and after a short briefing we assembled our vehicles into a caravan and headed north for the 45 mile trip to the Red Lake Nation Indian reservation.

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