Captain and Stanley are purring up a storm for you to track down THE
perfect fuzzballs for your program animals.

I hope that this allows some dogs and cats who might have had the odds
stacked against them at the shelter to find homes. Maybe they were adults
when people are looking for puppies and kittens, maybe they were large or
active or long-haired when people look for an easy pet to care for, etc.
But whatever it is, may some pets find homes who otherwise might not
have.

BTW... if the pet just seems to be a LITTLE sneezy, like Captain and
Stanley were, would they still be considered? In their cases, a few days
with a vaporizer helped a lot. Our vet didn't even recommend meds, since
antibiotics work to fight bacteria, not viruses. I would hate to think
that a pet might be passed over if it's got an ailment that would've
cleared up within a short time.

Anyway, the best of luck to you in this new phase of your training, and
you'll have all the prayers and purrs you can handle that you encounter
THE perfect pets for the program. AND that you both know it the moment you
set eyes on one another. :o)

Donna, Captain, and Stanley

Kristi, I love your vet tech journals - I know how busy you are with school,
diving, and work, but please keep these coming!

Hugs,

CatNipped

(snippage)

Good luck on finding the purrrrfect kitty for your program.  We all love
these journals so even though you're busy, exhausted, brain-dead (from
school!) etc. please continue with them :)

Jill

Hopefully, they are giving it to you with a logical structure. Now,
there are certainly differences with cats in that they can't tolerate
morphine, but start to think in terms of:

    Sedatives/anxiolytics
    Reduction of secretions (usually anticholinergics)
    Antiemetics
    Drugs reducing the volume and acidity of stomach contents,
      to protect against aspiration

In more complex anesthesia, preanesthetic blurs a little.  You can have
drugs that primarily are used to put the patient to sleep (no, not THAT
way), before the major anesthetic agent (e.g., an inhalational drug like
enflurane) is given.

You can also consider the drugs used for muscle paralysis for
intubation.  Again in human practice, usually at least two muscle
relaxants are used, one to stop the initial muscle jerks (fasiculation)
and another for the deep paralysis.

There are some very specialized categories that I'd call more
presurgical than preanesthetic. For example, if vascular or heart
surgery is planned, you give heparin to stop clotting, and then
neutralize the heparin afterward with protamine sulfate. For surgeries
that are especially prone to infection -- orthopedic or anything with an
implant -- perioperative protective antibiotics are often a good idea.

Good luck! If you look at pharmacology as nothing but memorization, it
is pretty boring. When you at least organize things by therapeutic class
as above, it gets a good deal more coherent.

If your curriculum gets deeply enough into biochemistry and physiology
so that you can classify the drugs by their biomolecular modes of
action, it starts making MUCH more sense.  Molecular pharmacology lets
you do things that we just couldn't do twenty years ago, such as predict
possible interactions between two drugs that had never been used
together.

Update:  Went to the shelter, but didn't find any kitties.

This shelter had a cat room withlots of cat trees and a  bunch of
healthy cats running out and about.   If you wanted to know more info
about the cat, there was a binder with their numbers and pictures.  The
really weird part was that there was NO ONE in the room.  If you wanted
to adopt a kitty, you find the corresponding page with the info and
bring it to the front desk.  So I was going to have to check out each
cat and feel them out.

The first one I found was a really cute orange long haired.  He seemed
really sweet, but unfortunately he's 12 years old.  The age limit at
school is 6 months to 3 years.

The next one was this pretty black Persian lounging on a minature love
seat.  He looked kinda nice so, I reached up to pet him.

"HISSSSSS!!!"

Okaaaay, guess not.

Then there was this pretty calico cat named Gypsy.  LOVELY coloring,
and she even let me pet her.  I was scritching her and she still seemed
to like it.  Then I started giving the cat a physical exam.  You know
looking in the eyes, ears and feeling the whole body and tummy.  I need
to make sure the cat is healthy.

"Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr......"

Um, okay, maybe not this one either.

Then there was this plump gray and white cat.  He practically rolled on
his back when he saw me.  I thought he was going to fall off the cat
tree.  Awwwwww!  He jumped down and rubbed against me.  I pettted and
scritched him.  So far so good.  He started purring.  I looked him over
and he seemed to put up with that.  He didn't seem to care for me
palpating his organs, but he seemed to be putting up with it.

This seemed like a potential kitty.  Now let's see how he like being
picked up and handled.....

"Reow!!!!"

"Ow!!!!"

The little s*** got me right on the face.  I now have a two inch
scratch about an inch below my right eye.  it's not too deep, but it
sure as hell stung.  It swelled a little bit and was red.  There was no
one around so I dabbed it with a Kleenex  and tried not to strangle the
little b*st*rd cat.

It's still a little pink, and it still stings a little.  I think I'll
live.

Pretty much the rest of the cats in the room were either too skittish
for me to approach them or they started hissing when I tried to pet
them.

So much for that shelter visit.   But I'm not giving up.  I'm going to
go to another shelter tomorrow and check out some more kitties.  I'll
be a little more careful this time, and hopefully I'll have better
luck.

Kristi

<big snip>

You can always find a new roomate. ;)

Sorry you didn't find a kit cat though.  Maybe next trip?

Purrs,
-L.