Christmas Day 2008

Merry Christmas!!
I can’t begin to tell you how busy this week has been. I may have mentioned that I was in charge of organizing volunteers for the Vet Clinic this week. Well, it turns out that we are super involved in running the clinic and are there all day everyday and today (Christmas) is our only day off and we are working Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. We spent this morning doing laundry, as it is our only day off. We got to sleep in a little extra too!
The clinic is supposed to run until 4:30 in the afternoon, but we haven’t left before 7:30 each night. Then we collapse into bed and start again the next morning. This feels an awful lot like work! We were scheduled to end the clinic on Friday, but Mia (the volunteer vet) got bumped from the plane in Hawaii last Saturday, so arrived a day late and they gave her extra time here. But her 7 pieces of luggage with all her medical supplies didn’t arrive until yesterday afternoon, so we were running on what little was left from previous clinics, plus a few drugs the hospital gave us. We now have a functioning surgery and an organized work area. For a while I didn’t think it was going to happen and the whole thing was going to fall down around us, but now it looks promising.
She is spaying and neutering dogs and cats and doing health checks and immunizations. I am her assistant, and am with her for all exams and surgeries. I’m injecting animals and will be intubating next week, and yesterday spent a half hour giving mouth to mouth to a cat!! (That was before our proper supplies arrived, so hopefully won’t have to do that again!) The cat is fine, by the way, and her owner very grateful to have her back.
Ted’s back has been in horrible shape and he has been hobbling around for the last week and a half. He can only be upright for an hour or two before the spasms get so bad he has to lie down. He is on multiple drugs, has gotten lots of advice from the cruising fleet, and it turns out Mia’s husband is a chiropractor and he brought his table, so yesterday he worked on Ted while we were working on animals.
This is not really the Christmas we had planned, but it is turning out all right. Yesterday morning I was very pessimistic, but now I’m optimistic that we will have a successful clinic. I’ll probably need to sleep for a week when it is over. One of the cruising couples in the fleet, Bill and Linda on Creola, have been a MAJOR help with all of this. They have been there all day every day and will continue to be with us until the end. We couldn’t have done it without them. We just met them when they arrived here and we are bonding with them through this experience. We were all disappointed to miss the Christmas Eve cruisers’ get-together last night, as the clinic went on and on, but we made our own party afterwards and made up a funny Christmas carol having to do with dog’s balls and anesthesia and sang it to the fleet as we dinghied home. So we are finally in the Christmas spirit and will have a nice pot-luck this afternoon with everyone.
Merry Christmas to all!!
PS from Ted; The back is significantly improving the last 2 days, not a minute too soon!!