A simple test:
If you're using the electro-cautery unit on "cut" mode, and you don't make lightsaber noises while slicing/burning straight through tissue, then there's definitely something wrong with you.

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.

Heilige: Hey Chryso, how are you going?
Chryso: Hi there Heilige, I'm good, let me go somewhere quieter, I'm at Peppa's house warming.
Heilige: Oh cool. How's it going? It sounds like it's really happening there!
Chryso: It's going really great. Peppa made punch and the usual suspects are getting pretty tipsy. It's so great to see everyone again. How's your part of the country?
Heilige: Cold. And I'm on call. I'm just ringing you because I've got this case coming in and I need some advice. Hope I'm not interrupting much.
Chryso: Never a problem. Hey, Peppa, Mindy, Jules, Lana and Irene are here. And me of course. Take your pick!
Heilige: Ooh, it's a bit of a complicated medical case, is Mindy free?
Chryso: Sure thing, I'll put her on.
Heilige: Thanks. Have fun at the party! Try not to stay up too late!
Chryso: You know I always do. Good luck!

Sometimes, when I'm surrounded by these noisy, laughing, drinking, roudy young people, I'll suddenly remember: Oh yeah, we're vets.

Oh great, what a perfect way to start an early Monday morning, with the worst kind of veterinary emergency on our hands.

WE'VE RUN OUT OF COFFEE.

Get someone on it, STAT.

A CHANCE TO RANT #1

I've spent longer at university than I care to remember, owing tens of thousands of dollars to the government while all my friends are buying shiny new cars and getting drunk and then writing off those cars and then buying newer, shinier ones.

I've been up long into the night with a colicky horse, or a stomach torsion and then been up and chipper for morning rounds, while attempting to look like I'm not an idiot. Which I must admit is pretty hard with a perfect outline of my watch permanantly imprinted into my forehead.

I've read countless textbooks too heavy to even carry and piles of notes that make the books look like instruction manuals for your new waffle machine. Step one: open machine, Step two: put in waffle mix, Step three close and turn on, step four: open later and consume the waffle and repeat steps 1-4. Doesn't really require instructions, now does it?

I have an in-depth understanding of absolutely everything that goes on in an animal from the Krebs cycle all the way to the creation of proteins and development from a foetus. That's right, if I wanted and had the necessary tools, I could probably build an animal from the ground up like a mechanic on a car. Maybe not a dog, but I reckon I could make a perfectly good newt if given enough time.

I have experienced what it is like to have less sleep than a mother with a newborn and still managed to sneak in four hours of cartoons. And they weren't even good cartoons either, but I watched them anyway, just because I could.

I've held a dying being in my hand and kept it alive long enough to fix it.

I probably know more about your animal than you do... in fact, I probably know your animal better than you know... well, anything. Not that that's anything to be proud of, trust me, you do NOT want to know more about ANYTHING than I do about animals.

I don't want to sound arrogant, but really, what I'm getting at is-
I AM A VETERINARIAN, GODDAMN IT!

So the next time I drop something, or trip over... I will be the one to decide if it's funny.

Five long years of university and a degree in a highly esteemed profession.

We're vets.