Being The Workaholic That I Am...

5.28 5:20pm
Even when I’m traveling, I can only stand so much free/unstructured time. Staying in the same place for three weeks, I have my mornings filled with kids and evenings filled with English students, but there were still the afternoons. I really like wandering around the markets, getting to know the city, going to the museums if they are actually open when they say they will be. But I can only do so much of that. And so it is that I got myself into observing and helping during the afternoons at a vet clinic. There is a clinic just a few minutes walk from my house that I’ve used as a landmark at which to turn right on my way to the center of the city. Once I got my fill of wandering today, I decided to stop by the clinic on the way back home. There is one vet who owns and runs the clinic but spends mornings working out in the countryside. The other staff there are a recent grad, a soon to be grad, and a vet student. During the day, they manage the clinic and take care of basic appointments and procedures, and in the late afternoon the older vet comes and does the more complex surgeries, etc. I talked for a while to Ricardo, the owner, who was really nice and willing to let me hang around. The two students weren’t there today, but I talked to Juanita, the recent grad. It was hard to get much out of her because she was really, really passive and shy, but it seems like she isn’t allowed to do surgeries and hasn’t done them since school. She says there are four vet schools in Bolivia and school lasts five years; I think you start straight out of their version of high school.

5/31/11 9:30pm
Didn’t have my flash drive with me the other day so posting the above late. On Sunday, I went to the vet at nine and waited around for an hour watching the cars race by, but no one showed, aside from a confused client who stood there for a while and left. I found out Monday that the office was closed on Sunday because it was the vet’s birthday – though he forgot to tell me that on Saturday when he said he would see me the next day!
Yesterday at the clinic was definitely interesting and so different than back home, but also very different and slightly more advanced than the clinic in Peru. The first patient was a dog who had been bitten badly by a larger dog earlier in the week and came in for wound care. The abdomen was filled with some sort of the fluid and the ribs were potentially broken, so they were sent to go get xrays elsewhere – definitely was an owner on the wealthier end of the spectrum. Another patient was a cat named Gato (which people name their cats in the US where Spanish isn’t the primary language, but here, really, a cat named cat!) who came in for a nail trim. They all kept gaping over how huge he was, and weighed him in quite the interesting way. They wrapped him in a blanket, stuck a hook into the blanket, and held him above the table on a hanging scale, poor thing. He was a whole twelve pounds and they thought that was gigantic; cats here are definitely on the smaller end but that was just funny to see. He was amazing for his nail trim, the owner holding him and the vet just taking one paw at a time to snip. Of the animals here I’ve seen so far, they are so much more well-behaved and easier to restrain than those in the US. Non-veterinary eyes can skip the next paragraph!

The most interesting case was a four month old pup with a history of seizures and an awful upper respiratory infection, no appetite, neuro symptoms, completely dehydrated, not looking good at all. The owner couldn’t afford much of anything, so they ended up putting the pup down. There was a bit of debate with the owner about the cost as well as a lot of joking around, which seemed really odd, but I only caught bits and pieces of what was going on. Owners are allowed in the room for pretty much anything else including surgeries, but not for the euthanasia. They started off by sedating with Ketamine IM, and then gave the final injection in the heart. I asked why they didn’t do IV and they said it was because the pup was dehydrated, but then they said that they always do it intra-cardiac, never IV, and don’t even check the veins first. Which I absolutely do not understand because it took a good four sticks and a bunch of probing around for them to even find the heart – thankfully the dog was completely sedated at that point. They injected a bunch of solution (well, a very small amount of euthanasia solution and about 20 mLs of diluent, strange…) into the heart but then decided it had gone into the lungs, so pulled up another syringe to inject again, but ended up not needing it because the other injection had indeed worked. All the while, the owners sat in this waiting room completely unperturbed, and then the doctor eventually bagged the pup and gave her back to the owners to dispose of as they pleased.

Okay, back to non-vet things. The more advanced English class last night was harder to teach because it got into some grammar specifics that I never learned, I just knew. In that sense, Spanish grammar would be easier for me to teach someone than English grammar since I never had to learn the rules or terminology. Between the teacher and I, we hopefully got the point across, though the book did a pretty awful job with that segment too. I got lunch today at Freya’s, which will be my new afternoon place to be. It’s a restaurant that serves vegetarian almuerzo (set menu lunches). You sit down and they bring you a drink and salad with bread, then soup, then the main course, and then dessert. Everyone gets the same thing, but the menu changes daily. The grand total for the meal is just under 2 USD. Much better than the more expensive or boring other things I can eat around here like an individual pizza for 5 bucks or the typical cheese and egg sandwich.
After lunch, I went to meet Isabel, the girl who I will be doing the intercambio with. She’s a university student about my age who is studying languages. Her English is pretty good but practicing is important for both of us, and it was fun to get to know a local student. I’ll meet her again tomorrow after my lunch at Freyas. With this added in, my schedule is ridiculously packed – leave for the kids at 8:15, leave there around 12:30 and make my way to central Sucre, grab lunch, talk with Isabel 2-3ish, walk 15 minutes to the vet and stay there till 5:40, teach English 6-8, then make a quick dinner at home before I crash for the night. Busy, busy, busy but lots of interesting fun things.
Tonight at Fox, the teacher I’m working with had a lot of studying to do for a test tomorrow, so she read while I taught the first class. Well, it turned out to be a private lesson, I had only one student show, but it was really good for her to have the one-on-one. She’s at a very basic level of English so I had to say most everything in both English and Spanish to get my point across, consulting occasionally with Cinthya when I couldn’t think of the word in Spanish. The second class had a better showing with six students, and we reviewed telling time, which is quite challenging for them but hopefully with all this repetition they will get it down. I walked most of the way home with one of the students who turned out to live just a few blocks from me; she’s in her late 20s or early 30s and works at a fancy hotel. I was a lovely nagging teacher and kept correcting her English as we walked, but it was really good for her to practice conversational English because in class she’s very hesitant to say anything in English front of the others.