the trip: the clinics

the original plan for our trip was to set up shop in the city of buzau, where there is a dog shelter of sorts, and the romanian army brings in up to 30 dogs daily that they've dart-gunned down on the streets, in addition to individual citizens bringing in their own pets for surgery. the last trip was insanely swamped, and we had a team of surgeons ready to rock-n-roll. well, yeah. those darn best laid plans again...
we set up shop in our little village (in some empty rooms at the mineral springs spa). we taped garbage bags to some desk-table thingies and used concrete blocks to raise them up for use as surgery tables. we spread out foam padding and set up a space heater in our recovery room. we got out all of our drugs and gloves and sutures and whatever all else, gave ourselves a pep-talk, and the army brought us a total of 4 dogs. several people brought us their own pets, and our amazing new friends duena and marius caught lots of street dogs for us, but there was barely any time that all four surgeons were operating at the same time for more than a few minutes of overlap. dr. colleen spent a good hour luring one semi-feral dog with snacks so that we could spay her. dr. lonnie did some great kitty snuggling in recovery. dr. andrea went on romanian tv three times, and dr. steele, well, she pretty much got in on all the surgeries she could, and worked with dr. dan (a romanian vet who joined us at the last minute). dr. dan had never spayed a cat before, but now he's awesome at it!
i was one of the people who went out an wrangled street dogs (and in one very exciting instance, a feral cat) leash in one pocket, muzzle in the other. we'd lure the dogs with snacks, lasso them, tackle 'em and slap on a muzzle so i could carry them back. not that they were super bad, but they were all terrified of walking on a leash, and i'm not gonna have a dog i don't know that near my face without a muzzle on. so we got a good dozen or so dogs that way, in addition to the friendly street dogs (el presidente/bobby the beagle, beetlejuice/marius the shepherd mix, and a few others) who followed us right to the clinic, and then hung out there for days after their surgeries. they loooooved the attention. and yes, some of the team fell in love with them. dandrea adopted marius, danielle has bobby, and jackie, bless her, is adopting palinka (a pup whose mom we spayed the first day) that means i'll get to keep tabs on her, since jackie's already a client at my office. woohoo! (side note: "palinka" is a homemade pear brandy, sort of like extra-strong tsuica. bobby is named bobby because one of the guys down at the cafe where he regularly begged called him that. marius is marius because "the real marius" is just an all-around amazing guy, in addition to being an incredible dog catcher and handler. also, it's a romanian name. and dandrea is like bennifer or brangelina. you know.)
back to surgeries. most of our patients were dog spays. most of them were not puppies. several of the dogs had some sort of blood clotting problem (local disease?) and oozed significantly during surgery. poor doggies. we had a couple of scary surgeries, but no fatalities (a great record when anesthetizing and operating on all ages of non-preexamined random dogs). on day one, we did 30 surgeries. when i wasn't out rounding up patients, i worked in surgery, monitoring patients and giving additional anesthetic drugs when needed. not being the hugest fan of blood and guts, i was glad to move to recovery on day two, when we again did 30 surgeries. strangely enough, day two was mostly cats. yeah, and i have cat allergies. and recovery was a small room with all the cats who needed handling/medicating/cleaning up/monitoring while they woke up. so i got pretty congested and sneezy. on day 3, i got to sneak into pre-op for a minute to help wrestle some terrified feral puppies out of a crate for anesthesia. yeah. so the one with explosive diarrhea also had the screaming-flailies and thrashed and squealed and sprayed filthy stinky poo all over me. yay. thank goodness i had pajama pants on under my scrub pants, as i was able to peel 'em off before the poo soaked through. oh... of all the days to wear the fuzzy leopard print pajama pants. photos were taken, laughs made, and then we got on with the work, fuzzy leopard pants and all. one of our "clients" on days two, three, and four was a lady we nicknamed "babushka". at first she came in pulling a wagon full of bundles. it took a while for us to figure out it was really a wagon full of cats! it turns out that, in romania, burlap shopping bags double as cat carriers. she had at least 8 or 9 cats all piled on the wagon. we "fixed" them all, then loaded 'em back up in their bags, helped her pile them on the wagon, and sent them on their way. she came back later with more cats, and then again with some religious pamphlets. we tried to explain to her that, since we don't read romanian, we couldn't read them anyway, but she insisted, so now i have a romanian religious pamphlet. by day two, people started bringing us goodies to thank us for helping out. we got still-warm homemade bread, some amazing eggplant/pepper stuff in a jar to slather on the bread, fresh pastries, cookies, fruit, and bottles of homemade tsuica, palinka, and red wine. this all in addition to the lunches that our hotel made and had sent down to us. lunches were a variety of soupy/stewey things, with mushrooms or cabbages or whatever. they always sent us two pots - one with meat and one without. how awesome is that!
by day 3, the americans in town were too big of a deal for people to miss out on - we had some looky-loos scope us out, and some of them picked on babushka for a while. they didn't seem to understand why we weren't impressed with their mocking of her. stupid guys.
and i know i left out a lot of stuff, but it's really morning now, so i'm gonna go start my day and get back to documenting the trip a little later.