I have become obsessed this week with a song. It happens now and then, especially when I am trying to write (and this week, for the first time in ages I have found time to work on Ready, Vet, Go!). I’m currently writing a very downbeat section, but the song is quite the opposite (for those who would like to listen, it’s Laid by James). I have been listening when driving to and from work (which I have done a lot this week). I don’t know about anyone else, but when I listen to frenetic music, crazily loud in the car, I find it very difficult to drive slowly. Of course, in Norway that’s a disastrous concept. The speed limit on normal roads is 80km/hr (50mph) and you definitely don’t want to be stopped by the police. I failed to come to a complete halt once at a stop sign, and it cost me more than 5,000kr (£500 / 650USD). So instead of speeding, I have to beat the steering wheel in time to the music. Just as well no-one is watching.

Wivek too seems to have been singing a lot this week. On Monday, when she had to give a cat a barium meal (to show up the stomach and intestines on an x-ray) she mixed it in with some tasty food and left the cat in one of the kennels for a few minutes. When I commented that maybe, just maybe it would eat, she started humming a Norwegian song – Optimist by Jahn Teigen. I had never heard this song before, so she wrote it down and I Googled it to listen on YouTube. I confess I am less obsessively interested in that one. Deeply apathetic might be a better description, but maybe I’m just not giving it a fair hearing.

Of course the cat didn’t eat enough of the food for Wivek to be satisfied, so we had to try a little ‘encouragement’. This involved a towel, a wrapped up cat and a good bit of claw dodging, but we managed it in the end. Even after all that, we didn’t find anything significant, but a lot of veterinary practice is like that. A lot of people have commented to me over the years, that it must be hard being a vet because the animals can’t tell you what is wrong. I usually counter this by pointing out that although they can’t tell you what is wrong, they also never tell you any untruths. Still, I don’t suppose my GP very often gets bitten or scratched by his patients. Later on I remember Wivek singing Manic Monday… so that must have still been on Monday. It’s been a much longer week for me than usual because Irene and Gerd are both off, and so I’ve worked four days instead of my usual two.

In addition to all that driving back and forth, there was also a meeting in Bryne on Tuesday night. Dagny told me about it in theatre in the morning. I had been feeling vaguely uneasy because I had heard people talking about some meal out, and I had been wondering whether it was something exclusive that I wasn’t involved in, or whether it was something I had missed. I was invited though. Dagny told me I was already booked in. She berated me (humorously) for the fact that I had missed the information, which she told me had been given out on more than one occasion at the Thursday staff meeting.

‘Too busy eating and everything just going past you,’ she said. I fear there may be something in that. I asked Wivek if she was going, and she told me she was. When I said I hadn’t known about it, she said it had gone over her head too, though it was in her diary, so it must have been mentioned at some point. With Jan-Arne though, I hit the jackpot. When I asked if he was going to the meeting tonight, he said,

‘What meeting?’ I could have hugged him. (Actually, I often hug him, so it’s surprising I didn’t just take the opportunity to do it again).

My favourite Wivek song of the week however, was the Propofol song. Propofol is the intravenous anaesthetic we use most often. It’s very safe and quick acting and so as well as using it to produce deep enough anaesthesia to intubate animals before using gas, now and then we also use it when the sedative we have used just hasn’t worked well enough to allow us to treat the animal without pain. It’s so short acting that the dog or cat can still go home with its owner almost immediately. I used it today, for example, on a dog with a really painful anal-gland abscess. It was a tiny dog, and those are notoriously difficult to sedate. The normal dosages often don’t really work, and higher doses… well I don’t like to use those too much in case they are not safe. And so in order to treat the little animal without causing any unnecessary pain, I topped up my sedative with some propofol intravenously. Happily Wivek was there to help me. The whole practice has been working well together as a team lately, and as I got everything ready, Wivek started singing.

‘Propofol, propofol,, propofol,’ she sang, to the tune of ‘Here we go, here we go, here we go…’ Just as well sometimes that we ask the owners to go away when we do jobs which are going to be messy. Of course, there are times when veterinary work can be very sad. There are many more times when it is very rewarding. But I like best the fact that sometimes, we just have a lot of fun.

Finally, this week’s picture is of Cita who is seven years old. She is the kind of patient that makes all things worthwhile. Despite the fact that she had to have her eye removed after a cat scratched it, and has had both her hips operated on, still she comes in and is really kind and gentle towards us. I couldn’t resist taking her photo before Marita took her in to clean her teeth. I guess that if you’ve read this, you couldn’t resist her either. Have a great weekend.