Gabriel Evan

Here is my baby boy, these are a few pictures from just before the hospital visit, during and on the way home.  He has been a wonderful child so far, very rarely cries at this point, just makes funny little noises.  He spits up often, and constantly poops, but I guess that is to be expected.  I am not nearly as scared as the little guy as I thought I was going to be.  I never wanted to be the guy who shows pictures of his kid and thinks he is cute when he really isn’t.  I think he is pretty cute, although I would admit that he kind of looked a little bit like a monkey when he first arrived.  He had huge hands and feet for his little body, maybe he will be a basketball player.  Anyways,  we are blessed to have a healthy little baby, and we thank God for him every day.  Hope you enjoy some of the pictures…

NO BABY YET!!!

1 week overdue

So, this crazy kid of ours is getting way too comfortable in his little home that he calls the uterus. I can’t say that I blame him all that much, it is stinking cold out side. My theory is that he started to come, and got a quick sense of how cold it is out here, and changed his mind. Well, we are going to do something about this! We are in the hospital right now and prostaglandins have been administered to Jeanette to try and soften things up enough to where we can give some more medicine to help induce labor. This is all very familiar, except all my experience with this type of thing has been with cows. I keep comparing Jeanette to the heifers and cows that we have been working with to induce calving. I don’t know if she really appreciates that too much! So anyways, here we are sitting in the hospital overnight to see if anything happens. Hopefully by this weekend, something will have happened. I will keep y’all posted. In the meantime, go ahead and enjoy some of the pictures that I took of Jeanette.

hey y’all… anyone still alive out there?

Hey guys, I have some down time here, I am waiting on this miserable, dreary, gray and rainy morning for some clients to drive two hours so I can discharge their dog.  I am currently on small animal orthopedics block, and so far it has been a good experience.  It has been a while since anything has been written, but there has been some interesting things going on here.  I was on Cardiology last block, and I got to see a horse in A-fib electro-converted.  Now that was a site to see!  A 1200 lb animal under general anesthesia get a jolt of electricity put through his heart was intense.  I highly recommend watching it sometime if you get the chance.  Otherwise, lots of boxers and doberman’s on the cardio-front.  I was on large animal surgery prior to Cardio, which was pretty cool.  I had my hands in some places that you just wouldn’t think to every put your limbs in.  We had a cow with a HUGE seroma at his hip area.  It was formed a thick capsule around the seroma and basically extended from hip to stifle.  We put the cow in stocks, gave her a local block and cut into her thigh to start draining the seroma.  The capsule was so thick, and it was so extensive that we wanted to get as much of the capsule out of her leg as we could, so I basically had my entire arm in the cows thigh, tearing thick, nasty capsule out of her leg.  We did a couple of C-sections and displaced abomasums on a few cows, lots of horse colic surgeries – that is also a site to see.  There is just something really strange about seeing a horse lying on it’s back in a surgery room – they are just huge animals that have even bigger problems I have decided.  PIGS!!! We spayed pig after pig, giant pigs!  The largest was 580 lbs.  She was a big, stubborn, and very vocal pig, but I actually enjoyed working with the big lugs.  The strangest thing about working on the pigs was that we used electrocautery on them, and it did literally smell like bacon.  The doctor was cauterizing, and all of a sudden it hit me.  The wafting smoke reached my nose and it actually made me a little hungary – something only a future vet would think, right.  I couldn’t resist saying something, which I have found works both ways in these universities, so I asked the doc if she could fry up some of that bacon and set it aside for an after-surgery snack.  They had spayed a bunch of pigs prior to me being in there and they all started laughing because it was the first time they really even thought about it.  We worked on reigndeer (if that’s how you spell it), Alpaca’s are the devil, and a giant bull that would have killed me I think it had the chance.  Large draft horses with colic are no fun to watch, and there are people that are willing to pay a rediculous amount of money on their animals.  Those are some of the things I have experienced so far. 

So, I was in ultrasound the other day with a patient and the ultrasound tech was telling some story about something that nobody really cared about.  I could tell no one was really listening to him, but kind of would give a “uh-huh” and laugh every once in a while just to get him through the story.  So, he got done with the story, and without even thinking I made some stupid comment that I thought was funny ( I can’t even remember what I said), and I turned, kind of laughing, to look up at him but he was just staring at me with a really upset look on his face.  The doctor was standing behind him, laughing, but at the same time gesturing with her hand back and forth over her throat, implying to stop now.  I kind of just went back to holding the dog, and afterwards, they were all laughing at me because apparently, that tech is known to not have a very good sense of humor and no one jokes with him because he is really sensitive.  Oops. 

Anyways, how are all of you?  I would love to hear from all of you.  I would put some pics of some of the stuff I have been doing around here if I could figure out how to get the pictures from my phone onto the stupid computer.  I will try to figure that out this weekend maybe.  Anyways, send something my way if you read this and feel inspired.  I should also post some more pictures of Jeanette for those that might be interested, she is still looking and feeling good, but she is getting “more pregnant” (I’m not allowed to say larger according to every other female that I have said that to).

Jamie Yurek Writes…

Jamie Yurek
jamieyurek@hotmail.com | 129.82.19.97

First couple weeks have been interesting. SA soft tissue surgery the first week, SA orthopedic surgery the second week. We are on emergency/ward duty at least twice a week, surgery on call twice a week. Craziest thing I have seen here was probably on orthopedics. Dog hit by a car had a two comminuted fractures in one tibia, and the other hind leg was pretty much hanging by skin just below the hock. They amputated that leg and harvested the pads from the foot which they implanted on the flank of the dog to keep the tissue alive. 5 days later when some wound healing had started on the stump, they reattached the pads to the stump to give natural padding for the prosthesis they would later fit for the dog. The double fracture looked impossible to fix to me…One fracture was proximal 1/3, the other was a cm from the hock. Both fractures just looked like an explosion. 5 hours of surgery later they had a triple ring transarticular “hybrid” fixator on there with about 12 pins spiraling out of the leg. Later in the week I got a case on referral for a cruiciate repair. They do TPLO here all the time and the owner went for that option. The resident actually let me put in a few screws and do some suturing (the most anyone has let us do by far), so that was pretty cool. Emergency wards can be interesting. Some ass brought in a boxer the other night that was showing ataxia and general stupor. We couldnt really get figure out what was going on and he didnt offer much in the history. On a rectal exam about an hour later we got the all too familiar smell of a rasta smokin a fat spliff on the street corner, and some buds in the feces. Upon further questioning of the owner came to an agreement that he probably ate the guys stash. The dog was kept on diuresis for a couple hours while coming down from his bad trip. An hour later some lady brough in a (I shit you not) 40lb snapping turtle hit by a car. All of us scratching our heads, we opted to put it in an O2 cage until an exotics doctor could see it and decide for euthanasia. Gotta go for now, equine field service begins tomorrow

“Prego”

Here are some pictures of Jeanette modeling her newly formed parasitic lump.  You should see how it moves, it’s kind of creepy.  There is a very active child inside of that belly, he moves and kicks all the time.  So far, both Jeanette and the baby are still doing very well, no problems so far other than being a little uncomfortable.  Jeanette has started teaching in the Ithaca City School District as a reading specialist – which I have no idea what that entails, but she is teaching kids how to read better I guess.  The work place has been very welcoming to her, pregnant and all.  She is 24 weeks, that is 6 mo.!  There aren’t many days between now and the time she should be ready to pop!