Just Another Night in Veterinary Medicine

Leah was exhausted.  She had been running wild like the proverbial decapitated chicken since the moment she got to work.  With two hours left in her shift there was no indication that that was going to change.  No matter how busy things got she still managed to feel like she was getting nothing accomplished.  Pulled in all directions at all times.  She had just settled down in front of a hospitalized patient’s cage to perform its hourly treatments.  Focus, she told herself.  Reign your mind in from the thirty million other things you need to get done right now and give this particular patient the attention it’s due.  Take a couple of deep breaths and settle in.  Leah glanced at the treatment sheet to make sure she had everything she needed.  Blood pressure, vitals, minor bloodwork.  Walk and feed.  She didn’t think this particular patient would be up for a walk, but she would feel it out, see how things were going after she had checked everything else off the list. 

The dog, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, lifted her head and thumped her tail in greeting as Leah opened the cage door.  Leah gave her a gentle pat on the head in return.  She loved cavies.  They always managed to be sweet, easy patients no matter how sick or injured.  As Leah finished placing a blood pressure cuff around the animal’s forelimb the overhead intercom buzzed annoyingly and the receptionist’s voice echoed through the treatment area: “Emergency assessment in the lobby; respiratory distress.”

Leah glanced around the treatment area, hoping to see one of her fellow techs heading for the assessment.  Everyone already had hands on a patient or was in an exam room with a client.  Of course.  With a sigh she closed the cage door and stood up.  “I’ll be back,” she told the cavie.  

The lobby was crowded with faces that all turned toward her in annoyed expectation as she came through the door, everyone feeling that they had waited long enough, surely it was now their pet’s turn to be seen.  Nope, she thought as she looked toward the front desk and saw the woman standing there with a gasping cat in her arms.  Every one of you just got bumped back yet again.

“What’s going on with your pet?” she asked hurriedly as she approached the woman, then stopped.  Leah suddenly felt desperately hot, awash with heavy, suffocating air.  Her lungs were thick with it and she couldn’t breathe.  The woman turned slowly towards her and her eyes crawled over Leah’s skin like ice, now leaving her suddenly cold and hollow.  What the hell was going on here?  Was she sick?  Was this what a panic attack felt like?

The woman facing her was tall, lank dark hair falling over sallow skin, baggy sweatpants and t-shirt draped over a sharp, angular figure.  The overall impression was of a hunched carrion bird.  Her eyes, icy blue and disturbingly unblinking, locked onto Leah and left her feeling impaled, a dancing worm on a hook, unable to look away.  Well, this was unpleasant.

“What’s going on with your kitty?” Leah repeated, beating back her wild imagination and trying to focus on the job at hand.

“She can’t breathe,” rasped the woman in a voice that couldn't possibly have seen any use in at least a decade.

The cat was beginning to flail wildly, panicking in its desperate struggle for air.  Leah reached out and hurriedly extracted the animal from its owner’s claw-like grasp.  “I’m going to run her back to the treatment area so we can get her some oxygen support and once the doctor’s had a look at her we’ll come get you into an exam room, ok?”  Leah’s tone was bright, the familiar words pouring easily from her lips, having been said roughly one million times before during the course of her career.  She could not WAIT to be away from this creepy woman with her piercing, dead stare.

Leah hurried back to the treatment area, the cat writhing like an eel in her arms.  She kept one hand firmly on its scruff; sick, panicking kitties had a tendency toward violence.  So no different from healthy kitties, in that respect.  Placing the cat on a treatment table she reached for an oxygen line as she called across the room for the doctor to come assess her patient.  The cat let out a strangled yowl, panting heavily, its eyes wide, tongue hanging out of its mouth.  Leah had finished counting its heart and respiratory rate and now lifted it onto the small baby scale on the end of the table, wanting to have a weight ready so the doctor could calculate emergency drug doses.  As she picked the cat back up off the scale it released another howl and sunk its teeth into her wrist, contracting and curling around her like a giant parasite.  

“Dammit,” she hissed, grabbing the cat’s scruff with her free hand and trying to prise it loose.  The cat bit down harder, shaking its head back and forth, then suddenly let go as it stiffened into a long, slow stretch.  The ER doctor had finally arrived at the table.  “She’s going agonal,” Leah informed the doctor wearily. “And she just bit me.”  To one of her fellow technicians who was approaching, seeing the struggle Leah was having, she said, “Will you go get CPR status?”  The tech nodded and rushed up to the lobby.  In the meantime Leah and the doctor began a somewhat halfhearted attempt at compressions and intubation - the black cat was skeletally thin and clearly ancient.  Whatever was going on with it had been going on for a while and was long past the point of effective intervention.  The technician returned from the lobby and informed them that they could stop; the owner did not want CPR, but she would like to take the body home with her.

“Great,” Leah said.  “Will you facilitate that, please?  I’m going to go scrub the hell out of this bite and pray I don’t have rabies.”

Three hours later Leah was finally home.  The garage door settled back into place behind her with a solid thump and she breathed a sigh of relief.  It felt good to be home.  Nights like this were exhausting.  It seemed that they never had a break from the craziness these days, each wild shift crashing into the next.  She felt bad for the way she had handled the situation with the cat.  The cat would have died regardless, but still, she had just stood there frozen in the lobby, more focused on her own bizarre reaction to the owner than on the obvious distress of the dying animal.  That was the thing about the ER being this busy all the time.  You just reached a point of mental and emotional overload and started dropping the ball at random moments.  It was unfair to the clients, to the patients, and to the overworked staff.  Leah took a deep breath and tried to remind herself that she was doing the best she could.  Still, maybe next time, do a little better.  Move a little faster.  

Her wrist throbbed with pain as she fed her own two cats before heading upstairs to get ready for bed.  Luckily she had been able to do a teleconsult with urgent care rather than leave work to have the bite addressed.  The doctor had prescribed antibiotics that she would pick up tomorrow on her way to work.  Tomorrow, when the craziness would start all over again.  Leah sighed and reached for her toothbrush.  As she did so she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye.  A reflection in the bathroom mirror.  She glanced up.  Nothing.  She turned and looked behind her.  Her cat Avery was on her bed, grooming himself.  Leah smiled at him and turned back to the sink.  Icy blue eyes met hers in the mirror.  She gasped and dropped her toothbrush.  Tried to leap backwards, but found herself frozen, transfixed.  Powerless to move her own muscles.  The eyes stared at her from out of her own reflection, but there was no question; they were the eyes of the woman with the black cat.  As they bored into her, Leah began to feel cold.  A paralyzing numbness started at the tips of her fingers and toes and began to creep inward, moving towards her core.  Something began to solidify in the mirror in front of her, a reflection taking shape alongside her own.  Leah was beginning to feel weak, distant.  She felt the lights going out in her.  The emerging reflection was a black cat.  With bored disinterest it watched as Leah gasped one final breath and collapsed to the floor.