Mixed Practice

He laughs and thanks me, bundling up the nine puppies and heading off. The work phone sits in its dock, untouched.

Fifteen minutes earlier: “Chryso! Chryso! It’s crying! It’s crying!”
No way. No way!

Twenty minutes earlier: Oh, yuck. Oh, yuck. This uterus is full of rotten browny greeny dying rotten… rot! There’s no way there could possibly be anything alive in here. This ranks among the top 5 of worst things I’ve smelt in my life. I’m a vet. That’s bad.
Gross, the puppy in here is swimming in a bag of brown gunk. Better hand it to my nurse, but there’s no real point in trying.
“Oh yuck Chryso. It’s blue and covered in all this disgusting green stuff. Is it even worth trying to revive it?”
“It will probably die but let’s try anyway, then we can say at least we tried.”

Twenty minutes earlier: Okay don’t panic don’t panic, so you haven’t done an afterhours caesarean by yourself yet and this is your nurse’s first night on call, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine don’t panic. The phone’s right there. You’ll be fine.

Ten minutes earlier: “The x-ray shows that there’s still a puppy inside. We’ll have to do a caesarean, it’s got to be dead and there’s no way she can push this out by herself.”
Oh, crap. I’m scared out of my mind.

Ten minutes earlier: “Okay, I got the dead pup out. We have to take an x-ray to find out if she has any more inside - she might need a caesarian."
Please let me be wrong.

One hour earlier: “Your beagle had eight pups this morning, and she just has one hanging out of her now twelve hours later? And it’s dead? You need to bring her in. She could have more in there, we need to take an xray.”
Oh crap, oh crap, I hope I don’t have to open her up what do I do if she needs a caesarian??

Six hours earlier: Dr Boss catches me in the corridor. “Okay Chryso, now that Dr Newbie is starting, we won’t be able to back you up anymore. Tonight will be the last night you can call for back up.” He puts the phone in its dock and smiles. “But you’ll be fine. I think you’re ready.”

Dear readers: a few announcements. 

Firstly, thank you for still following us despite the obviously decreasing number of posts. Our sincerest apologies for not keeping this blog up to date. I'd thought that by this time we'd be well into what I was going to call Season Two. As always, life kept happening and we all got too busy. I think the episodic/thematic approach made it harder for us to keep it up. So for the sake of regular posts, we will be dropping that - for now.
The final announcement is that since things have settled down, I hope to be posting regularly again. You see, we're no longer new grads. We are now recent grads, looking over the new new grads, and entering a new world of responsibility.

And there are so many stories to tell.