I was up before dawn this morning, my mind clipping along like it had something useful to do. I was thinking of the animal characters for the children's books Laurie proposed yesterday. A coyote named Yip. A box turtle, a gecko...
I finally admitted that I was awake, so I got up and made coffee.
The sidewalks and roads are a solid sheet of ice. I will not be driving to the museum this morning, that's for sure.
I was remembering animal stories from my days as a vet tech, too. Like the time we had to draw blood from a whole litter of pot-bellied piglets.
There are few things cuter or funnier than a piglet. Or louder. Some pot-bellied pig breeder brought in a whole litter to be checked out before they could be sold, and we had to get blood from each of them. I think there were four or five. They were cute as hell: just a little bigger than a football, black and prickly, with these incredibly cute, soft wet snouts. They make adorable grunting sounds, they snuffle at your clothes, and root around in your armpit while you're carrying them. They are perfectly friendly, docile little things as we bring them into the treatment room.
Now, to draw blood from a pig, you go in through a vein on the side of the belly, rather than through a foreleg like you do in a dog or cat. You can also get blood from a vein in the ear, if I recall correctly.
Well here's the thing about piglets. They are cute and adorable as long as you make no effort whatsoever to restrain them. But the moment you do, they begin to SQUEEEEEL like a pig. It sounds like this:
RRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEE! RRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!! RRRRREEEEEEEEEEEE!
They also most strenuously object to having a needle jabbed into their side, and thrash wildly. So we have two technicians trying to hold one of these piglets down so the doctor can draw blood. The thing is going nuts, scrabbling its little hooves on the treatment table and screaming bloody murder. You can hear it all over the clinic.
So Wally, the head doctor, wigs out and makes us march the piglets back into the Xray room at the back of the clinic so the sound won't carry as far. We put one on the xray table and start again:
RRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEE RRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEE!
Now the instant we stop restraining it, the little piglet hops up on its trotters and goes back to making contented little snorting, grunting sounds. This gives us a bit of a breather in between screaming sessions...
We put a towel over it to muffle the sound. Now we have three techs and two doctors in this tiny xray room. Someone said "It squeals like a pig." And it was all downhill from there. The techs all got the giggles and we started making pig jokes and cracking ourselves up. "Don't hog up all the space," or "This one is a ham." And every bad joke got us giggling more than the one before.
Wally's having a coniption fit. "God dammit! Hold it! Hold it! Do your fucking job" He's calling us all sorts of names. Now we have four technicians and two doctors. And we are still working on the first pig. We still have no blood sample.
At last we all calmed down enough... probably due to Wally threatening to fire all of us... to get organized. Four techs and a doctor hold each piglet down. Remember, this is an animal the size of a football. Then Wally, swearing the whole time, whips in and draws the blood. The piglet is SCREAMING throughout this entire operation. It sounds like we are rending each of them limb from limb.
When all the pigets are done, we get a grip on ourselves, and carry the container of piglets back out to the waiting room. Everyone there looks white as a sheet. I'm sure they think we've been torturing those poor piglets.
That's my story for the day.
If we can get our car out today, which seems doubtful, we'll take Grayson's sled to the park. Otherwise, looks like we're on Ice Arrest.
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