McLaughlin, SD

McLaughlin, South Dakota was the third and final site in the reservation that we held a clinic at. McLaughlin is known as the busiest site in the reservation. We spent three days there: two surgery days and one wellness day. From where I was standing, it was also the most fucked up site in the reservation. I’d say the health status of the animals there was a couple notches above Belize, but significantly lower than Brazil. At least in McLaughlin (unlike Belize), people consider dogs to be in the “pet” category. I don’t know if that really says a lot, though.

It was the same trend that we saw in Fort Yates: a definite distinction between the “pet” and the guard dawg. Some people didn’t have dogs as “pets,” but as workers… McLaughlin is in an area with a lot of beef cattle, so we saw a lot of working cattle dogs. There’s nothing wrong with that… UNLESS you’re putting the dogs to work without paying attention to their welfare and health status. That was a concern that appeared in a big way here.

Also feral cats. Lots and lots of feral cats.

For my first day at McLaughlin, I got to be the anesthetist again. That made me happy. You get to do a lot as an anesthetist and all of the things are related to preventing your patient from dying… something that I’d like to be proficient in as a veterinarian.

We filled up on surgery slots at around 8 AM on both surgery days. There was a crazy demand for surgery… which is great. It also sucked, though, because we had to turn a lot of people away. We only had the time and resources for 50 surgeries a day. That’s a lot, but there was more demand. A lot of the surgery slots got filled up by straight up feral cat HOARDERS.

Everything was good for me as an anesthetist until the feral cats started coming in. I was placing catheters, not panicking while monitoring in surgery, and I even had my multitasking down enough during surgery to WATCH the actual procedure being done. That’s in comparison to my first day as anesthetist, where I felt like Lucy on that episode with the chocolate factory because I was constantly struggling with balancing between taking vitals every five minutes, giving fluids, and giving my patient an occasional breath on the machine. I was feeling pretty good.

Then the cats happened.

In case you don’t know what FERAL CATS are, the name is synonymous with FRUSTRATION. Feral just means wild, essentially. I’ve gotten to the point that I can generally tell a cat is feral just be looking at them for a few seconds. They are in FULL ON fight or flight mode. Their pupils are fully dilated and a lot of them have a really distinctive meow. They’re terrified, really. I feel bad for them… and then they do something like lodge their claws in my throat. That happened on my first day at the Kent County Animal Shelter back in 2008. Good times. People used to dump off duct-taped cardboard boxes filled with feral cats on our front door before the shelter opened in the morning. I, as the lowly intern, had the fun job of opening these boxes and then catching the feral cat(s) that came springing out like bats out of hell. Feral cats also don’t understand the concept of windows. They would usually fly out of the box and try to jump out of the glass windows on the door, only to bounce off and start tearing around the room. Ideally, they wouldn’t come flying out of the box and I could snatch them up with a net before all of that traumatic stuff happened. We had scissor nets and tupperwares for that. So, yeah… that’s fun with feral cats. All a part of a day in the life of a veterinarian.

Despite the fact that these feral cats at McLaughlin were “owned,” they generally belonged to hoarders. Hoarders usually have a couple cats that become pet-like. The rest of their living collection tend to roam free in their house as a gigantic, unkempt cat colony. They’re often not handled or socialized because there are just so many of them. I don’t even know how many this woman brought in. They were all filthy, mean, and had upper respiratory infections so we just started piling them in cages in the men’s bathroom of the gymnasium.

You can’t do the whole calm, rehearsed pre-surgical sedation regimen with feral cats. It doesn’t really work. Feral cats can fight their way through mild sedation with pure, unadulterated rage. You just give them the drugs and get them on gas anesthesia as quickly as possible. I got the last feral cat as my patient to monitor during a spay. Most of the time, feral cats wake up quickly and violently. I say violently because they tend to wake up and be immediately angry as fuck. Jessica monitored one that she said woke up and within a matter of seconds, tried to latch onto her arm in one of those angry cat balls and someone had to help her get the cat off and toss it back into the cardboard box from whence it came.

My feral cat, however, would NOT wake up. For almost two hours I sat on the floor of the men’s locker room filled with ammonium scented feral cats taking vitals every five minutes. This was from about 7:30 PM to around 9 PM. The bathroom was hot and probably had at least 200 flies in there. I felt like I was slipping into madness, but I shouldn’t complain. Andrea, the vet tech, had to sit in that bathroom for the entire afternoon. I walked in at one point and she was sitting Indian-style on the floor, humming, swaying, and eating Fig Newtons. I got there.

I got out of that god-forsaken bathroom at around 9 PM and got a chance to eat dinner. My hair smelled like ammonia all night.

After dinner, I sat out in the car and drank vodka. I always had vodka. Vodka was important. Jessica would come out with me. This was our nightly thing. I thought I had it rough with the feral cat bathroom stranding, but Jessica saw some bad shit on receiving. The working dogs on the reservation are worked until they can’t work anymore. That and the fact that most people don’t have the means to travel to a veterinarian.

Jessica saw a cattle dog that had its leg run over by some sort of vehicle over a year ago. She described his leg to look like “when you see a dead squirrel that got flattened by a car and just dries out and turns into jerky.” It was completely crushed. Due to disuse, the rest of the arm kind of shriveled up into an atrophied blob that just dangled there. There were open wounds, abscesses, flies, and maggots on it.

The leg thing was only second to the hot mess that was happening on the hind end. Apparently this dog also had a hay bale fall on him, leaving him with a half-severed tail and no control of its rectum. He was covered in feces, but also backed up and impacted to the point that it had to be manually removed.

The most astounding part of the entire thing? The dog was still working and herding cattle. RUNNING. That’s not to say he’s doing well. His body condition score was apparently no higher than a 2/9. That’s essentially skin and bone. They called the head vet over who  gave them two options, (1.) go to a vet clinic and have the leg amputated, but the dog will have to live inside (remember the incompetence issue) and be given special treatment for at least a month or two or (2.) euthanasia. This is the kind of thing that makes it so hard to be a vet. I would be pushing euthanasia like a motherfucker. I’m still at the point where emotions play a big role in my actions. It’s hard for them not to when you work with adorable, innocent creatures all day every day. But it’s really not your place as a veterinarian to tell people how to make life or death decisions. If the client specifically asks, you then have a right to say what you’d do if it were your own animal. It is a veterinarian’s job to present the options, the potential repercussions of one’s choices, and to respond accordingly with the client’s wishes.

The people didn’t want to euthanize the dog. They wanted US to amputate the leg. Our lead veterinarian did not think that they were a good candidate for such a major surgery… plus we don’t DO surgeries like that in the gymnasium at RAVS. This dog lives outside on a pasture. It doesn’t have a house to take shelter in. They don’t even see this dog for months at a time. The owners left, upset that we wouldn’t perform surgery on their dog. They came back the next day and again, said “We thought about it and decided that the dog can live in the house if you amputate the leg.” That request was, once again, declined. WE CAN’T DO THAT HERE. Plus, I can only imagine the level of aftercare (or lack thereof) that dog would receive. The only service we could offer at our limited mobile clinic was euthanasia. And then the people disappeared with the poor dog.

Again… veterinary medicine is NOT all puppy dogs and candy canes.

That night, Jessica and I snuck out. We went to the bar. We had to. There was only one bar in McLaughlin and within that bar, there was only one patron: a heavily-sauced gentleman named Glen Yellow Horse. Bad ass name. He was a bad ass guy, too. The bartender was half Caucasian, half Sioux and was extremely well educated. We just ended up hanging out, talking, drinking beer, and eventually I got into a joke-telling battle with the bartender. That’s right—Shawty got jokes. Especially when I’ve been drinking.

At the end of the night, Jessica and I snuck back into the gymnasium at like 1:30 AM, tiptoeing around sleeping bags full of our peers. It was weird. I felt like I was 17 again.

The next day was my surgery day. It was fun. I got to scrub in and do stuff in two dog spays, a dog neuter, and a cat neuter. It’s weird being back in America and watching surgeries. I got kinda ingrained in my third world country ways, so surgery was strange.

YOU MEAN I CAN’T TOUCH ANYTHING?!

It was good though. Except for one of my cases. She was an inconspicuous 2 year old shepherd mix. We opened her up and saw that her spleen was ENORMOUS (probably from tick-borne disease) and she was in heat… so her girl parts were friable. JUST LIKE BELIZE DOGS! In a nutshell, everything went wrong. The abdomen filled up with blood after the uterine arteries were ligated, then the suture cut into and through the body of the uterus, plus the spleen was ginormous. We were in surgery for about 90 minutes. That’s LONG. I didn’t get to do much in that surgery (and fuck, neither did I WANT to), but catastrophic surgeries like that are the ones you learn the most from. I think so, anyway.

Floppy floppy spleen things

I asked Dr. Paul, the veterinarian doing the surgery if he gets nervous when stuff like that happens. “Of course,” he said. “I’m always nervous during surgery. You should be.”

My third and final day at McLaughlin was spent on receiving, which was crazy– as usual. Angry cats and guard dogs galore. People were lined up down the street in their vehicles waiting to be seen by a pair of veterinary students. We would just take our little portable treatment caddies and bathroom scales out to the truck.

At around 4 in the afternoon on our seventh, and final day at RAVS we inventoried and packed up our clinic for the last time.

It was a really good experience. I am extremely glad that I did it. I wouldn’t really describe it as a “fun” experience in the traditional sense of the word. We kind of felt like it was a veterinary boot camp of sorts. What I learned the most from RAVS was the more “technician” kind of skills: putting in catheters, intubating, monitoring in surgery, etc. Some people may be disappointed by this, but it’s that kind of stuff that I feel like I need to practice the most. Yes, a veterinarian in practice generally has technicians that do these things, but what if your technician can’t find the vein for a catheter? What if there’s something wrong with the anesthesia machine? What if your assistant is some high school kid who is too nervous to get a mean cat out of a carrier? The vet has to be able to step in and fix these problems. We don’t really get a lot of practice doing “technician” things in vet school. With that being said, veterinary technicians are amazing people to learn from. They are the glue that holds vet clinics together, honestly. I feel like I learned more from the technicians on the RAVS trip than anyone else. They would give us little tips along the way that are truly good things to know. I learned a lot and I am so grateful.

I just want to, once again, thank the people who donated to my fundraiser that allowed me to go to RAVS. Your donation helped bring veterinary services to animals who SERIOUSLY wouldn’t have access to it any other way. You helped make this possible:
30 veterinary students. 6 veterinarians. 6 technicians. 7 days. 3 gyms.
821 animals treated. 200 spays and neuters.

That’s pretty incredible if you ask me.

Oh and we took a puppy home. We named him Abu because he’s a little street rat. He had a nasty case of worms and was, at first, a parvo suspect. We couldn’t just leave him. Look at this face:

street rat street rat street rat street rat

And so my summer is drawing to a close. I am starting my third year of veterinary school tomorrow. This is my last semester of “book work.” In January, I move onto clinical rotations and I couldn’t be more excited. A different setting every 3 weeks… that is RIGHT UP MY ALLEY.

It was an incredible summer, though. It feels like forever ago that I was in Rio de Janeiro but that was this summer too. I feel like I’m a completely different person now than I was in the beginning of May. I got to see some amazing places and meet/ learn from A LOT of truly wonderful people. I am forever changed.

Someone recently told me that I should take more breaks or that I shouldn’t work so hard or that I should chill the fuck out or something. Even though it has all been veterinary-related, none of it feels like work to me. I love what I do. I had a little more than a week off after RAVS, and I spent two full days hanging out at Dr. Schuiteman’s clinic because I just think it’s FUN. I want to live my life in a way that allows me to keep loving what I do. I just don’t know what that way of life will be yet.

Thank-you all for reading my blogs—one of them, some of them, most of them, or all of them. I have grown to really enjoy writing at the end of the day. My brain is a big jumble of weird, and writing about stuff has a grounding effect on my life. It kind of helps me weed out the extraneous clutter that’s always bouncing around in there. Plus, I feel like it’s beneficial for people to see what kind of bullshit we have to go through in vet school. It’s hard and, YES, veterinarians are in fact DOCTORS.

Anyway, I have enjoyed rambling to you all this summer. I may continue doing it.

Maybe…

To be continued…

Or not…?

Fort Yates

We spent two nights in Fort Yates. Again, we had one surgery day and one wellness day. I was on receiving for both days. That makes three days in a row of receiving. IT’S MADNESS, I TELL YOU!

On Tuesday, Jessica was in surgery so I had to find a new partner. I found a good one. Her name was Karen and she just finished her first year at Washington State. I was a little nervous because it takes a while to get in the groove of seeing appointments with another person, but we started the day off great in a SIX DOG appointment.

The conditions of Fort Yates were significantly worse than Cannon Ball. Jessica and I escaped from the pack one day to go to a local gas station to get booze. Booze is important in times like these.

We were forbidden to leave the gymnasium. I don’t LIKE being forbidden to do things. It offends me. It makes me want to do them. Plus, I just really like talking to people who are different than me.

ANYWAY… this first appointment had six dogs: two puppies that were around 8 weeks old, two puppies that were around 12 weeks old, and two adults. We rejected one of the 8 week old puppies for surgery because it was just too young to get neutered. He only had one testicle out for god’s sake. We can spay or neuter anything as long as it’s two pounds. Their testicles should really be present, though, otherwise you have to enter the abdominal cavity and it’s a little silly to do that in an 8 week old puppy. They’ll come out soon. Adults and older puppies, though… if that testicle isn’t out, you need to go in and find it. That’s called a cryptorchid.

If we CAN fix the puppy, we WILL fix the puppy. Trust me, this reservation doesn’t need ANY MORE PUPPIES. The other five dogs in the appointment, though, got cleared for surgery. The dogs had come to Cannon Ball the previous day and already got vaccines, so a big portion of our appointment was already done. We were still proud, though, that the appointment didn’t take us any longer than 90 minutes to see six animals and get them cleared for surgery. That’s pretty good.

The rest of the day was interesting. Karen and I got one weirdly aggressive cat. His name was China and he was a handsome Siamese tomcat. He had the big, cute tomcat jowls. I love tomcat jowls, I must say. I don’t love tomcat behavior, though, so those testicles have to go. China was weird. He tried to kill me multiple times, but the second I’d take my hands off him he would start cuddling my arms. China was like Tourrette’s guy.

So, is he or is he NOT actually dead?

After that, we got a pair of pretty tolerant older kittens. The owner warned us that one of them wasn’t feeling well. We got her out and found that her temperature was nearly 105 degrees. SHIT, SON! We got a veterinarian immediately and moved the appointment to our isolation ward. What is the isolation ward in the community gymnasium of Fort Yates, you ask? Why…the men’s locker room, of course. Obviously, she was too sick for surgery but we gave her IV fluids, tested her for panleukopenia (which was negative, thank god), and sent her home with antibiotics. We had to get gowned, gloved, masked, and the whole nine yards. I was forbidden to wear my white coat again for the rest of the trip. We need to be careful at these clinics because, really, a traveling veterinary clinic is one gigantic fomite in and of itself if you aren’t careful. We had to monitor the sick kitten’s housemate for a few hours to be sure he didn’t break with a fever and get sick just in time to have surgical complications. He was fine and he ended up getting neutered without any issues.

We filled up with surgeries before mid-day, so receiving got a little slow in the afternoon. I hate standing around, so I found things to occupy myself with… like cleaning and watching surgeries. The family that brought in the 11 cats the previous day found TWO MORE cats to bring in, one of which was pregnant to the point of bursting. She had a note on her record: “Handle gently to prevent labor.” She was massive. The family did NOT want any more kittens so they spayed her and euthanized the kittens… which can be upsetting to people. Shelter life and the reality of veterinary medicine in general has kind of ruined puppies and kitties for me. Don’t get me wrong… I love a snuggly puppy. But there are simply too many snuggly puppies and kitties in the world who don’t have homes. It’s a hard reality, but it’s the truth. Clearly this family was having a difficult time handling the feline overpopulation problem within just the boundaries of their own home. They didn’t need any more exponential kitten growth.

SO MANY SURGERIES

The really pregnant cat was an interesting spay to say the least. I had to try really, really hard to resist the urge to steal the cat uterus filled with euthanized kitten fetuses out of the garbage. HOW COOL WOULD THOSE SKELETONS BE?! Jessica and I made a plan to sneak over after the clinic wrapped up and take it, but Jessica got involved in a complicated surgery of her own.

Jessica witnessed the dreaded dropped pedicle. A “dropped pedicle” is what one gets when you THINK the ovarian artery has been properly ligated to stop bleeding, let it go, and then the abdomen fills up with blood. This is confirmed when you hear the vet say, “Fuck!” or “Shit!” or “Balls!” or “Darn! (if they’re lame)” Jessica saw this on her first surgery day. In a fucking pug. That pug’s name was Bella and she was adorable. She spent the night at the clinic and went home the next day just fine. A dropped pedicle is scary, though. That ovarian artery comes right off of the aorta. A spay is never “just a spay.” A spay is pretty intense abdominal surgery. In Belize, Dr. Tesecum wouldn’t let us touch a spay because the complication rates are so high. That’s especially true in Belize because all the bitches have uteri that essentially melt in your hands from so many previous litters and maybe even pyometras.

Jessica & Miss Bella

Wednesday was another wellness day. Jessica and I got to work together on my third day of receiving in a row. Do you want to know something really interesting about working on the reservation? People’s last names. They had last names like Holds Arrow, Strong Bull, Red Eagle, and Taken Alive. I don’t like the last one. It makes me feel like I need to apologize. Taken Alive. Jesus.

Jessica and I got some MEEEEEAAAN cats on Wednesday. Mean fat cats that you can’t scruff. We got through it, though.

After lunch, Jessica wasn’t feeling well. I was feeling brave and decided to take on a two-dog appointment by myself. Dumb. Everyone was packing up the clinic because it was time to move again. Of course my case ended up being complicated. It was a miniature pinscher and a Chihuahua. The Chihuahua was only a little bitey. The miniature pinscher, however, had an upper respiratory infection. I noticed it, called a vet over, and we got her some antibiotics. It’s hard doing all of those things in addition to vaccines, deworming, etc. when you don’t have another person to run and get stuff for you. There is always an exceptional amount of paperwork involved, too. Rabies certificates and whatnot.

The farther we got from Bismarck, the less “normal” pet ownership became.

These two small dogs came from a home that also has 3 large, mean guard dogs outside. The owners refused to neuter the guard dogs because they want them to be tough and scary. Okay. I GUESS I can respect your opinion there. They also haven’t spayed the Chihuahua or Miniature Pinscher for monetary reasons. Well, when the little dogs go into heat the large guard dogs are ALL OVER that shit. He didn’t bring the large dogs in, but he said they’re shepherd mixes. SHEPHERD MIXES. These two females are both less than 10 pounds. OW! I’m not okay with that. The Miniature Pinscher got pregnant a couple weeks after they got her and had a litter of 3 puppies, of which only one survived. One of the puppies, the owner informed me, was born “without a head.” I told him like 20 times that he should spay the females if he’s not willing to neuter the large, male guard dogs. Not only is it risky to allow that bitch to carry puppies that large to term without a veterinarian on hand, but there’s clearly something stagnant in that gene pool. Born without a head? He said he might come to our surgery day in McLaughlin the next day. I never saw him again.

And that’s what I mean by the sliding downward scale of animal welfare from Bismarck toward the interior of the reservation.

Most families have two kinds of dogs: a PET and a DAWG. The pet is a little frilly lap dog that gets treated like a member of the family. The dawg is an unsocialized, untrained guard dog. Sometimes, the dawg isn’t tied up. It’s not uncommon in the reservation to have your pet get mauled by a dawg. When I asked a client if they had any other pets in the home, it wasn’t uncommon to hear, “We had a cat, but she got killed by a dawg last month.” Also in response to fractured teeth being pointed out, one client giggled and said, “OH! That’s probably from all the dogs he’s killed!”

SoOoOooo that’s a thing. I didn’t hear it AS MUCH in Cannon Ball. In Fort Yates, people started bringing in more dogs that were too aggressive to get inside the clinic.

We’d still SEE the patients, though. They would just be out by the truck. We’d hand a muzzle to the owner and vaccinate the aggressive dogs kind of like you would vaccinate beef cattle. WILD.

That is more of what I expected to see on this RAVS trip. We started to see more mange and things that make the old animal rights activist in me start screaming and gathering red paint.

I’M NOT LIKE THAT ANYMORE I WANT MY LIFE BACK I WANT MY LIFE BACK

It’s a vicious rage cycle.

We saw a German Shepherd puppy get brought in with a disturbing eye wound. He was probably 6 months old. He got mauled by a dawg, but his owners couldn’t afford to take him to a veterinarian. His owner told our intake people that his skull was showing after the dawg attack. It was a farm guy, so what did he do? Tie the dog’s feet together, duct tape his mouth shut, have his wife sit on the dog, and stitch his head wound shut with fishing line. Spoiler Alert! IT GOT INFECTED.

It’s hard to decide how one should feel in response to a case like this. The guy THOUGHT he was doing a good thing. He wasn’t stitching the dog up with fishing line without anesthesia with cruel intentions. He didn’t have money for a vet and wanted to help his dog. What do you say to that?

This is reality. I’m no stranger to the sad realities that a career in veterinary medicine can reveal. When I start to see things like the fishing line dog, or the perpetually impregnated Miniature Pinscher, or a family with 8 puppies that they won’t let inside the house, or any of the things I saw in Belize or Brazil… my brain goes into this auto-pilot-like setting. Jessica calls it “Chelsea-Bot.”

And what happens in my brain when I convert to Chelsea-Bot Mode is best depicted as follows:

It’s a protective mechanism, I think. In the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of fucked up stuff. I have learned to turn off the angry part of my brain and turn on the efficient part of my brain. That is Chelsea-Bot.

It’s not always a good thing. Jessica had to remind me a few mornings, “No Chelsea-Bot today, okay?” I stomp around like a nazi, grabbing handfuls of leashes and muzzles and furiously scribbling notes on my patient records. Chelsea-Bot always happens.

After that last appointment with the Miniature Pinscher and the Chihuahua, we packed up once again and hit the road.

Cannon Ball

We spent two nights in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. We were holding two clinic days. Sunday was a surgery day and Monday was just a wellness day. Saturday night, I received my assignment for the first clinic day. I was assigned to work anesthesia. Anesthesia makes me nervous because (a.) anesthesia is essentially “controlled death,” and (b.) anesthesia machines scare the fuck out of me. I’ve worked and shadowed in vet clinics essentially non-stop since I was 19, but my knowledge of troubleshooting anesthesia machines has essentially remained unchanged. I learned about it (in theory) great detail during one of my classes last semester, but it was right around finals time. ‘Finals time’ is a time of attrition in the vet school world. I just try to stay alive at that point. We had something ridiculous like 8 exams in less than two weeks. I reached my breaking point and decided to just go to bed without studying half of the material for that class’s final because I calculated my grade in the class if I were to get a ZERO on the final… and I would have still passed the class. In your second year of vet school, you pick and choose your battles. It’s unfortunate but true. The anesthesia machine lectures lost the battle in that one. 

Come again?

I woke up in the morning and reported to my anesthesia orientation. I left the anesthesia orientation feeling more intimidated than when I stumbled into the anesthesia orientation at 6 AM. My duties as an anesthetist were (in a nutshell) as follows:
— pre-medication of animals awaiting surgery
— calculate IV fluid rates for all animals going into surgery
— determine (based on patient weight) what kind of ventilation circuit you want to put your patient on, ie. Rebreathing or Non-rebreathing system
— determine the “bag size” (also based on weight) you want to put your patient on based on a calculated lung tidal volume
— take pre-medicated patient over to induction station to be cleared for surgery
— place an IV catheter
— intubate patient
— set up anesthesia machine for patient while drugs take effect
— once the patient is on the table, turn on oxygen & isoflurane gas, then attach animal to fluids and monitors
— monitor patient’s temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate, blood oxygen saturation, mucous membrane color, and capillary refill time.

It looks way scary written out that way.

Luckily, you work on the first patient with a partner. Jessica was my partner. Our first patient was a brachycephalic dog. Great. A Boston Terrier, to be exact.

What’s a brachycephalic dog?

the “smoosh-faced” breeds

FUN WITH LATIN!
– “Cephalic” = pertaining to the head
– “Brachy” = shortened
– Brachycephlic = short headed mutant… they’re cute as hell, though.

Dolichocephaly is seen in dogs with an elongated head, ie. greyhounds and collies. Mesocephaly is in-between… or normal, really.

Brachycephalic dogs are scary in anesthesia because, well… they CAN’T BREATHE normally! That’s especially true when they’re unconscious and everything gets all floppy and they’re lying on their backs. Brachycephalic dogs, while cute, are genetic mutants. They have a soft palate that is too large and has a tendency to slip out from under the epiglottis and get sucked into the airway, they have an enlarged tongue, and they have narrowed nostrils. With all of that working against them, they have to suck really hard to get air into their lungs. This strong negative pressure further exacerbates the problem by literally causing the hollow sacs in their larynx to pop inside-out and FURTHER occlude the airway. We had an entire lecture series about brachycephalic dogs in our Respiratory course. We have a surgeon at Michigan State who specializes in fixing these deformities when a brachycephalic dog is still just a brachycephalic puppy… naïve and unaware of the potential respiratory struggles awaiting him.

I still really want a pug, though.

So we got our patient all ready and on the anesthesia table without complication. I placed the catheter and Jessica intubated. This was our first day, mind you, so things weren’t running entirely smoothly. I think there was an error in communication because we were told to put the patient onto the surgical table, but he was still a little light on the anesthesia. We unhooked him from the induction table and moved him over. After all of that stimulation, he was waking up. In response, we were instructed to turn the isoflurane (anesthetic gas) up a bit. In response to that, our patient decided to stop breathing.

I’ve seen this happen a few times in past jobs and whatnot. It’s a concern, but not a reason to panic. When an animal gets too heavy on anesthesia, they might stop breathing. You need to be aware of this and then use your BAG (the one I calculated the bag size for… remember from my explanation before?) to breathe for them until they start breathing on their own. The conversation is essentially as follows:
“Shit. Did he just stop breathing?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Okay. Turn down the gas and give him some breaths.”
“Okay.”
But in this first day of RAVS, when everyone is getting adjusted and is at different levels of clinical experience, it became:
“HE’S NOT BREATHING!!!!!!”

And suddenly there are like four anesthetists tripping over monitoring equipment to make sure everything is hooked up appropriately. We had to continue breathing for him for the duration of his neuter.

Damn you, brachycephaly!

He did survive the surgery, thankfully, and we moved him over to the recovery area where our patient refused to regain consciousness or elevate his body temperature above 99 degrees fahrenheit. We sat with him for probably 30 minutes, monitoring vitals before we decided to just take him outside. The gym was actually air conditioned!
“If I know a Boston Terrier, I know he’d do anything for food,” Jessica said.
She went and got canned food and the little pig perked right up and dragged his hind legs toward her for the food. Within a few minutes, he was up and walking. Walking like a drunk person, but walking nonetheless.

And then it was time to function independently as anesthetists. The rest of the day was much smoother. I didn’t have any more brachycephalics or near-death experiences.

We did, however, lose power on and off throughout the afternoon a few times. Every half hour or so, the lights would shut off and the air conditioner would make a loud whirring sound and then fall silent. The lights always came back on though, and when they did, the fire alarms would go off for a second or two and THEN the big scoreboard in the gym would make a frighteningly loud buzzing sound like the one you hear at the end of a quarter or whatever sportsball word you use for when you’re “out of time.” I don’t do sports. Random loud noises, though… great for maintaining a level anesthetic plane.

This happened a handful of times and the lights would always come back on.

But then they didn’t.

We continued doing surgeries without power. The anesthesia machine runs on air pressure from the oxygen tank, so that’s fine. The monitors are charged with battery power. What was our limiting variable? The fucking clippers we use to shave animals. They started dying. Once that started to be an issue, we switched to doing ALL cat neuters. All of the cats on this particular afternoon came from one household that brought in 11 cats in one day. They were almost all juveniles and they were almost all infected with an upper respiratory infection. Therefore, they were almost all DOCTOR ONLY surgeries. “Doctor only” cat neuters are finished before I can even get the monitors and fluids hooked up. I spent more time in cat recovery than I did anywhere else once the cat neuters started. It was an interesting afternoon, nonetheless. The gym was all dark and everyone was marching around in scrubs and headlamps. I felt like I was in the dorkiest coal mine ever. But instead of mining coal, we were battling angry cats in dark tents.

And that was day one. I loved anesthesia and I became so much more comfortable with it. The machines, especially. I now know how to assemble and troubleshoot anesthesia machines… and that was my biggest concern going into my anesthesia day.

The days are long. Essentially every day, we got started with patients by 7 AM and some nights we weren’t done seeing them until after 9 PM. On this first day, we reached a point that we could only do cat neuters but we didn’t wrap up the clinic until after 7 PM. It was exhausting.

Sunday was supposed to just be a “wellness day,” but we had some patients leftover that didn’t get to have surgery the day before because of the power outage. There were only a few, so a small group of students did anesthesia and surgery. Everyone else (myself included) was just seeing appointments… that’s called being in “receiving.” I love being in receiving. It’s hard work and appointments can be very trying, so it’s kinda hard being on receiving multiple days in a row. With that being said, if you want to be a small animal vet… you’re going to be on receiving every day for the rest of your LIFE.

I don’t want to be a small animal vet. I do want to be a mixed animal vet, though, so I will still be seeing these appointments regularly.

RAVS comes to these same sites in Standing Rock every year. This is the ONLY time that most of these animals get to see a veterinarian. The people in the reservation can’t afford to take their animals to the vet. Also, the nearest vet is pretty far away. There aren’t veterinarians in the reservation.

So when RAVS comes to the reservation, people come from all over and line up in cars down the road. Most of these people have a shit ton of animals. To have an appointment with one or two animals is rare. Most appointments that I saw had at LEAST three. The most animals I had in one appointment was seven. That wasn’t at Cannon Ball, though.

Jessica and I worked receiving together.

Veterinarians aren’t paid enough to deal with the animals we have to deal with on a regular basis. You know how “society” thinks pit bulls, rottweilers, and other “bully breeds” are threatening? NOTHING is more threatening to a veterinarian than a trembling Chihuahua or dachshund sitting on the table. Those fuckers bite. THEY ALWAYS BITE. When you walk into an appointment and read that your patient is a small bitey breed, you take a deep breath and think, “That little shit better not bite me.” And they will probably try.

The big “bully breeds,” though? They’re typically just derpin’ on the floor, wagging their tail, and anxiously awaiting that fateful moment when the tall lady in the white coat pets their head.

And then there’s cats. Period.

I feel like we had ONLY Chihuahuas that day. Most were surprisingly tolerant. One wasn’t. After we had a few dog appointments, we got a huge six cat appointment that took almost two hours. You have to take a history from the client, do full physicals, give vaccines, dewormer, flea treatment, and address anything else the client is concerned about. This client was concerned about ear mites. The cats were all really good, thankfully. You have a small window of time that you can fuck around with any given feline patient. Even the most tolerant ones. They get sick of you handling them within 10 minutes, tops, so you better be done with your annoying shit by then and SAVE THE WORST THINGS FOR LAST. Taking a rectal temperature can turn even the most docile housecat into a kicking, spitting, biting, hairy ball of fury.

Like I said, veterinarians don’t get paid enough for this shit.

There was also a fat little Chihuahua after the cats that was so mean, he was biting his owner. It required me, Jessica, one veterinarian, and one technician just to give him two vaccines. We distracted him with potato chips, which he just attempted to bite at in an aggressive manner.
“Yeah, we’re just gonna send you home with this oral dewormer.. okay?” we informed the client.
I’m sure she’ll be able to get him to eat it at home because he “only eats what she eats.” Not dog food. He had a body condition score that was like a 10/9.

You can generally tell if an owner is going to adhere to your diet suggestions based on the owner’s own body condition score. It’s mean and judgmental, but it’s generally true. Think about it.

After a day of seeing patients it was time to pack up the entire clinic, load the truck, clean the gym, drive to Fort Yates, and set up the clinic all over again. Packing up sucks more than reassembling. It didn’t take that long, though. Maybe 90 minutes to pack up and clean. We set up the clinic again in Fort Yates insanely quickly. It was our second time doing this and I took on the task of helping Jessica with recovery set-up. I’d say the clinic was fully assembled within 45 minutes. Crazy.

This was the best gym in my opinion. It was air conditioned, big, and had a separate dining area, and had TWO bathrooms with a lot of stalls! That’s luxury right there.

Fort Yates community gymnasium

After we got the clinic set up, we had a rounds session and got ready for bed.

And onto the next one.

Camping, Coincidences, & The Heisenberg Principle

There’s a lot to catch up on. For starters, I’m back in the United States. I’m not that happy about it to tell you the truth. I love some people here very much, but it’s just so mundane… so unfortunately normal. There have been some pretty cool stuff that has happened since my last blog, though.

For starters: Jody just happened to be on my flight back to the United States from Belize. Jody. The guy who me, Paige, and Kelsey met at a hostel and traveled around with in The Cayes for a week. We were on the same flight from Belize City at the same time and went to the same layover destination: Houston.

CRAZY!

He messaged me the night before and we found this out. So we met at the bar in the airport (of course), had a drink, then boarded our flight. Jody, of course, had a seat in first class but he made the woman in the seat next to me’s day by offering to switch seats with her so we could hang out.

❤

When we got to Houston, we made a grand entrance by hopping on a motorized cart that was speeding by to get to our gate. Once we got to our gate, we had to jump off and I landed flat on my back like a turtle. The driver turned around, pointed, and laughed.

We drank a fair amount on the plane.

We were about to go our separate ways when Jody decided that he’d change his flight to the next morning so he’d keep me company on my dreaded 12 hour layover. I told him that it wasn’t necessary, but he insisted on doing so AND getting a hotel room at the nice Marriott attached to the airport. Have I mentioned that he’s one of the nicest people that I have ever met? We tried to get discounts by claiming to be newlyweds, but it didn’t work. We ended up drinking wine and ordering a movie. It was a crazy awesome coincidence. I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again, but it just goes to show that life has a way of surprising the hell out of you.

Eventually, I did make it to Michigan. Jessica, one of my best friends who is in my class in vet school, picked me up at the airport in Detroit. Hours later, we were on the road to South Dakota for our spay & neuter trip with the Rural Area Veterinary Service (RAVS).

This was on Monday. We didn’t need to report to the Native American reservation until Saturday. We decided to make a fun road trip out of it and spend a couple nights camping in The Badlands. Why the Badlands? Because that is perhaps my favorite place in the United States. I just really like bison, honestly.

*THE* World Famous Corn Palace

Our road trip was a lot of fun. We drove straight through the night, but made a lot of fun stops. The best one was a little roadside attraction behind a shell gas station about an hour east of The Badlands called 1880 Town. It’s an Old West style town with a Dances With Wolves Museum and a costume shop that (for a mere $7) provides a menagerie of vintage attire. They don’t sell beer in the saloon unfortunately, but the management at 1880 Town was willing to bend the “open container” laws for us.

…And what did we do in return?
Get tipsy, completely misplace two props somewhere, realize that there really was no way to justify this to the staff other than “We just like drinking heavily at 1 PM,” come up with a plan to change out of our costumes like our lives depended on it, and peel ass out of there like we were robbing a bank.

All for a pair of old white gloves and a lacy fan.

Only Chelsea & Jessica.

We eventually made it to The Badlands and reached the rustic campground at the far western end of the park called Sage Creek Campground. There’s no water or electricity and it’s literally in the middle of a prairie with no trees. I love it, though. There are beautiful rolling hills as far as you can see and there’s a HUGE herd of bison that roam around and sometimes even come into the campground. It’s so hilarious AND terrifying to drive through the herd because they freak out, buck, and stare at you as you pass by. It’s an adrenaline rush and we were screaming-laughing the entire time.

“Will they or will they not charge my car and gore me?”

The next morning, we went to the magical, cryptic wonderland that is Wall Drug. If you’ve ever taken a road trip out west, you’ve seen signs for Wall Drug starting essentially once you cross the Illinois state line. The signs never explain what Wall Drug is, but the signs serve to build your anticipation of finding out what the fuck this place is…. so you stop.

I went on a road trip with my family back in the day and we were denied the privilege of Wall Drug. Me, my brother, and sister were acting up in the back seat (I was nearly 20 at the time, by the way) and after hundreds of miles of billboards, my dad punished us by driving right past the exit. I didn’t forgive him for years.

I can honestly say, though, that it’s really nothing to be sad about missing out on. It’s a huge mall-like structure in a tiny town called Wall (population 800) that consists of about 100 stores that essentially all sell the same items. Apparently people eat that shit up. They do have a really good café that serves a mean breakfast, though.

We spent one more night at the campsite before heading over to North Dakota. An hour south of Bismarck, we got a room at a dumpy little place called Don’s Motel. In the morning, we finished the drive to Bismarck and met the rest of the RAVS team. There were 6 veterinarians, 9 technicians, and 30 veterinary students from across the country. Six of the vet students are made up of us ravishing Michigan State students: me, Jessica, Danielle, Allyson, Ashley, and Michelle. We met at a hotel in Bismarck and formed a caravan out to our first destination on Standing Rock Reservation—a city called Cannon Ball.

Once we got to the area, I was surprised because I imagined it to be much worse. People described these reservations in a not-so-nice manner. It looked like a neighborhood you would see in Detroit.

Our clinic site was a modest gymnasium, where we would set up a fully functional veterinary clinic, kitchen (for us), and sleeping area. We slept on the floor of all the gyms right next to the clinic set-up. Within minutes of arrival, we were unloading and setting up the clinic. “The Rig” is fully loaded with tupperwares called “action packers” numbered 1 – 100-something that are packed in and out by numerical order. Each of us was assigned an action packer to inventory, assemble, and pack up at each clinic site. Everyone except me, that is.

“Action Packers”

I got to inventory The Rig.

The up-side of that was that I only needed to pack and unpack in the beginning and end of the trip. The down-side was that everything I was inventorying can NOT get warm or it doesn’t work—namely, VACCINES. That was a little stressful… but I managed. Once I got that done, most of the clinic was set up. It was amazing. Each clinic has a receiving area (where clients sign in), a client appointment area (where we’d see patients, do physicals, and do treatments), a patient holding area (aka cages), a surgical recovery area, two cat tents (for the wicked, wicked felines), and le pièce de résistance– a SURGICAL SUITE.

The finished product

recovery

Once we had that all set up (it took a couple of hours), we had dinner, and our first “rounds” session. Usually during rounds, you talk about interesting cases of the day… but for this rounds session, we were debriefed about how the first day would unfold, given our assignments, and dismissed for our surgery practicals.

Rounds.

On another note, I failed my surgery practical on the first try. It turned out that the ligature I had been practicing wasn’t even the ligature that they wanted us to know.

I guess I should have watched the videos.

I realized this discrepancy about 5 hours before we arrived at the gym in Cannon Ball. If I thought I was going to have performance anxiety before that, this was a whole new level. I don’t even know what the fuck my hands were doing when I got to that test. I had no control over them.

There I was—calmly bullshitting in line with a couple of vet students from Scotland like I do best. Then I step up to the test, thinking “Fuck it… I’ll just do MY ligature. It’ll be fine, right?”

At the last second, I looked at the ligature everyone was doing. It was the RAVS video ligature. My brain was like…
ABORT! ABORT! DO THEIR LIGATURE!

The most ironic thing of all was that I was literally teaching surgical techniques in Belize just days before that. I generally don’t get nervous neutering a dog, but stand me up in front of a RAVS surgeon and give me a latex hose to ligate.

Suddenly I’m fucking Kosmo Kramer holding a hemostat.

I told you that would happen. Fucking Heisenberg Principle. Look it up. It’s not just a cool name from Breaking Bad.

I got to retest, though, and it was just fine.

NOTE TO SELF: look at test materials BEFORE test

I’m not going to lie—it’s not the first time I’ve walked into a test without looking at all of the test material once. IN VET SCHOOL.

I am making an eternal vow RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT to not do that ever, ever again.

And that was night #1 at Standing Rock Reservation.

White Girl Wedding Crashers

I’m leaving Belize today. I can’t believe it has already been a month since I found myself in the Belmopan bus station looking to be reunited with Paige on our way to Placencia. It’s almost August. What the hell?

Friday was a great day as well. I’m not sure if I liked Thursday or Friday better to tell you the truth. Friday was another horse day. We went out to a beautiful ranch in the same area as the beef farm we visited on Thursday. This time, thankfully, the van did NOT break down. I actually went to this ranch back in 2011 and loved it. It’s just as beautiful now as it was then. The ranch is managed by a couple—A Belizean man and a German woman. They have at least 25 horses & mules and they all just roam around on the property, but they’re surprisingly well behaved for the most part.

We got there in the morning and started doing physicals on them, giving them subcutaneous rabies vaccines, and giving them oral dewormer. It was really nice having that many animals to teach with because it gave me a good pool of equids to find abnormalities in. I found a really cute buckskin mare with a hoof abscess, so that allowed me to show the students how to recognize a lame horse. It wasn’t a really severe abscess, but it was inflamed enough that the digital arteries were dilated and you could feel that they had an abnormally strong pulse. That’s generally pretty hard to feel (even for vet students like me), but this mare was a good teaching example for the students. Don’t worry—the husband at the ranch is a farrier (horse hoof trimming wizard) and has been seeing to hoof issues like this one for years. I also found that mule heartbeats sounded quite different than horse heartbeats, which was good for pointing out heart sounds.

After we did vet stuff, they let us go riding for free! That’s the cool thing about ISIS courses… they are real. The tuition that students pay goes toward the purchase of medical supplies. Those medical supplies are used to help local farmers and pet owners. When we help them out with free vet care, they are really appreciative and do nice things for us like give us food (beef cattle day) and let us ride horses for free.

The ride was one of the most beautiful I’ve ever taken on horseback. We were in the Maya Mountains and we took the horses through the jungle and to a bunch of incredible scenic viewpoints.

It was a really nice day, too: not too hot with a good breeze. We rode the horses to the top of a small mountain and it was breathtaking, honestly. It’s hard to say what the coolest part of the ride was, but I really liked the fact that a bunch of other horses from the ranch just followed along with us on horseback through the rainforest, across the savannah, and up the mountains. I felt like I was in the middle of a herd of horses, which was a really cool feeling. There was an adorable two month old COLT running alongside us and he followed us ALL THE WAY up the mountain! He would make baby sounds every once in a while interspersed with cute little foal bursts of energy where he’d do stupid stuff like frolic in the grass and bounce at huge palm fronds.

Look at da baybeeee

Also, it was Demetria’s first time riding a horse and she was extremely entertaining.

It was a wonderful day. At the end of the ride, we walked around the ranch a little bit more and found a really cool treehouse. I wanted to live there a little bit.

When we got back to San Ignacio, we were informed that there was a neuter waiting for us at the clinic. When I entered the clinic, I was informed that there was a neuter waiting for ME to do in front of everyone. It was a cat neuter, which I’ve gotten pretty good at if I do say so myself.

The hardest part is the ligation of the spermatic cord because it’s a special little knot, but once you get the hand motion down it’s a piece of cake. I remember learning it, though, and I would get so pissed off about it. New knots always piss me off. I never knew it was so fucking difficult to tie a knot until I got to vet school. I literally got in a fight with one of my best friends, Jessica, in surgery lab when tensions were high over KNOT TYING. You just get really pissed off at yourself when you can’t grasp what is seemingly a simple concept: tying a knot. But in vet school, a knot is never just a knot. Knots are special.

From the International Guild of Knot Tyers… because apparently that’s a thing.

And now I’ve written the word ‘knot’ so many times, that it no longer looks like a word.

We really hadn’t eaten much all day, and by this point it was mid-afternoon. We went to Eva’s for lunch-dinner. I got lobster curry and halfway through eating it, I found a fucking bone inside of something. Last time I checked, lobsters were invertebrates… so I almost barfed, quit eating, and vowed to never eat there again. Gross.

We decided that we were going to go out on the town for our Friday night. We had like 5 hours to chill, get ready, etc. I chose to pass out for like four hours. I have no self-control, so naps are an issue for me. They’re more like comas. I woke up and it was pouring rain (excellent sleeping weather), but I got up and got ready to go out with the girls. We drank for a while at the pool bar here at Midas and watched some of a really weird movie with the bartender who essentially lives here—Thomas. He informed us that there was a gym at Midas the entire time. We thought he meant there was a man named Jim at Midas, so he clarified by taking us into this weird spare room filled with old Christmas decorations, baby toys, and exercise equipment. There were also big oil paintings of white people. Apparently, as Thomas told us, they are the owners of Midas.
“…But is she a white?” Demetria asked.
Liat and I almost peed our pants.

Eventually, Megan and Emily woke up from their naps. Amanda and Arin, on the other hand, did not. The five of us went to the cemetery bar and the karaoke bar before we called it a night. It was fun. I love the cemetery bar. I call it the cemetery bar because, well, it’s right next to a cemetery. It’s delightfully strange.

On Saturday morning, we had to be at the clinic at 9 for a little makeshift spay & neuter clinic. It was nothing like the one in Succotz two weeks ago. It was also raining, so people have a tendency to not come out. We only had 3 spays. A bunch of puppies came in for vaccines, though. They were sickeningly cute. A little bit of me dies inside every time I have to poke a puppy with a needle. They generally don’t handle it very well… unless they’re dummy labs. In which case, you can give them a tongue depressor with peanut butter on it and they’re none the wiser.

After that, we went to the San Ignacio market. It’s really cool on Saturdays. They have all kinds of food vendors, locally-made items, and LOTS of fruit. I got way more tacos than anyone should ever eat, soursop ice cream, and melon juice. Delicious. I’m going to miss the food here. Belize (and surprisingly Nebraska) has turned me into a real Mexican cuisine snob. There’s nothing I hate more than fake Mexican food. La Seniorita can suck it.

After that, we had to scramble and get ready for a wedding. Yes, a wedding. Remember the farm where we watched the horses banging? The main horse guy who led The Jump, Gilmar, was getting married on Saturday evening… and he invited us to the wedding.

Or so we thought.

We had no idea what to expect for this wedding. We really, really wanted to go with one of the Tesecums but unfortunately that didn’t happen. So here we are, a bunch of white girls, getting dolled up for some farmer’s wedding. The wedding itself was on Dr. Tesecum’s family ranch. We didn’t find any Belizeans to go with, so we rolled up to the wedding in our ghetto ass van by ourselves. We walked in and it felt like one of those moments in the movies where some weirdo walks into a party and you just hear the record player suddenly screech to a halt and everyone stares in silence as the unwelcome visitors stand in the doorway awkwardly amidst intermittent whispering. That happened, but multiply it by 50.

As if we didn’t feel out of place enough, a guy who was clearly with the catering service walked up to us and asked, “How did you guys find out about this?”

We explained that Dr. Tesecum, the ranch owner, told us we were invited.

“What do we do now?” someone amongst us whispered.
“I don’t know,” I responded. “We could sit down or something?”
There were no chairs, so we stood huddled awkwardly by the bar while everyone stared at us.
“I think we should congratulate the bride,” Liat said. “It’s even more weird if we don’t.”
Gilmar and his bride were seated right behind us in front of a gift table. I walked up to them, looked at Gilmar and said: “I just wanted to congratulate you both and thank you for inviting us to your wedding.”
The bride just gave us the bitchiest look ever and turned her head in the opposite direction without saying a word.
Gilmar looked at us with a “WTF are you talking about?” face. He just looked at us, shrugged his shoulders, and looked at his wife like, “I don’t know these people.” I’ve never felt so uncomfortable. It’s very hard to make me uncomfortable. I still don’t know if he actually invited us OR if he didn’t want to admit to inviting us in front of his wife.

AWKWARD AS FUCK

Why would I say that?

White girls stick out like a sore thumb. We get a lot of attention just walking through the streets because we are so different. San Ignacio isn’t that touristy. It’s more touristy than it used to be… but it’s nothing like The Cayes. People look at light skinned, light haired white girls as the Western ideal of beauty. I don’t get it, but it’s a thing that I’ve noticed a lot all over the world. In India, for example, they sell whitening cream to lighten your skin. Billboards and commercials feature the lightest skinned women. In Belize, too, white girls are rare and men just constantly YELL things at you… like from buildings and from down the road.
My personal favorite: “Hey sexy white girls!”
If I go downtown, I WILL get followed by a guy trying to get my attention for at least half a block, asking me questions about my name, where I live, if I have a phone number, if I’d like to get a drink sometime, etc. It’s not just me. It’s all of us. I could be wearing fucking nun attire, and I’m pretty sure it would still happen.
If we’re wearing scrubs, it’s even worse.
“Hey doc, I’ve got a sore back. Can you come over here and help me out with it?”

Personally, I think it’s weird because us white girls want to look darker with tanning and bronzer and whatnot. I think dark-skinned women are way prettier than me. I wish I looked more like them! It really is funny [and stupid] how the grass truly does appear greener on the other side.

So to a Belizean woman, I think it would be annoying. And I don’t think she knew we were coming to her wedding. So when a pack of us rolled up in a loud, huge ass van and barged into her wedding all dolled up unbeknownst to her… I don’t think she was happy. I know she wasn’t happy. Everyone was staring at us. She wouldn’t even look at us and she ignored me when I straight up congratulated her. So that was awkward. But I’m sorry, I know it was her wedding day and everything… but WHAT a BITCH! Seriously, though… How rude.

And Demetria? Well, she said she’s “guilty by association.” She really could have come in unnoticed. Everyone asks her if she’s Belizean. She’s beautiful. She made up a game plan to use this to our advantage if we ever get mugged. She said that she’ll just walk over to the side of the muggers and act like she’s one of them (as a Belizean), steal our most valuable items, and walk away. Like a chameleon bandit. Now I can sleep at night while I’m back in the United States and my students are left down here in Belize without a paranoid TA to nag them about never walking anywhere at night.

After we got over the shock of that encounter that ALL of the other girls witnessed as well, the wedding got more fun. I’m pretty sure people knew we felt out of place and started coming up and interacting with us and inviting us to dance. It ended up being a really fun time.

Dr. Tesecum and his immediate family were there. We were supposed to go with Ruben, and I still don’t really know what happened because we never found him. Dr. T’s sons were there. Ernest is great. He’s a hilarious and awesome kid that I find highly amusing to talk to… despite the fact that he frequently tells me that he wishes I was Paige because Paige is #1. That kid loves you, Paige. Do you know what he said to me?
“It doesn’t matter what you do You can never be Paige.”
But I think my personal favorite insulting comment was:
“Were you born when Jesus was alive?”
He’s great.

We left the wedding early because we were planning to check out the newest night club in town, Taboo. We’ve been planning to check that club out for a long time now. We’ve attempted to make plans to go there a lot… and once again, we didn’t go. I’m not too sad about it, honestly. I’m not much of a club girl. I tend to find myself feeling angry and stabby in the club. I actually don’t at all understand why girls like clubs. I like going once in a very great while, but I need to be prepared for creepers at all angles. In addition to creepers, it can be guaranteed with absolute certainty that my heels are going to hurt my feet a lot, that people going to step on me/ bump into me, that my drink will get slopped all over my arms/ dress, and that I’m going to have the overwhelming urge to punch dudes/ yank stupid girls by their hair. This negativity brought on by club rage is generally mitigated by getting into a drunken bitch fight with one of my close friends.

NOT A CLUB GIRL.

We just ended up staying in and playing Cards Against Humanity, which is totally fine with me. We had to get up early the next morning for another adventure.

We debated whether we wanted to go to Guatemala this weekend or stick around and do fun stuff near San Ignacio. Guatemala sounds like a lot of work to me. I really want to see it, but to go just for one night sounds like more trouble than it’s worth… especially since it’s a pretty shady place nowadays and there are travel advisories telling Americans to stay OUT of that country. My mom will be pleased to know that I actually opted out of that bad idea.

Ruben and Dr. T’s other brother, Andrew, rode with us on our adventure day. The main adventure was to go to Caracol—a huge Mayan ruin site. I had never been there, but Xunantunich is one of my favorite places in the whole world, so I’ve always wanted to check it out.

Caracol is about 45 miles from San Ignacio. Those 45 miles are brutal because the roads are essentially nonexistent. It took 2 full hours to traverse those 45 miles. It was hard finding someone to ride with us out there because it’s such a time consuming and exhausting trip. I drove the entire thing, there and back. My brain still feels like it’s bouncing around in my skull. It was the most intense drive I’ve ever completed. I’m never doing it again. I can’t blame people for not wanting to make the trip. Andrew was really awesome to volunteer as tribute for this venture.

Here’s how I recruited him:
At the wedding, Ernest really wanted to show me his Xbox. He led me into a weird unlit room at the ranch where his little brother, Ethan was playing. He told me to sit down and I suddenly felt like a weirdo/ pervert in this dark room on a bed with two little boys while drinking warm, flat beer out of a can so I made an excuse to go back out to the party. There was someone sitting on the armchair in the dark corner of the room the entire time and I had no idea he was there. He scared the shit out of me by saying, “So I heard you want to go to Caracol.”
My response: “Jesus Christ!”

I’ve still got it.

Caracol was SO cool. It was huge. It was like entire Mayan ruin village! We didn’t have a guide or anything so we just walked around, explored, and climbed shit. It was fantastic.

After Caracol, Andrew directed us to Rio Frio Cave. Again, this was AMAZING. It was essentially a beach inside of a cave in the middle of the jungle. Words or photos can’t do it justice, so I’m not even going to try.

After Rio Frio Cave, we went to Big Rock Falls. It’s a favorite place of mine. The falls are huge and beautiful. They’re also really fun and challenging to climb, but if you do it you can jump off which is rather enjoyable for me. JUMPING OFF STUFF!

After Big Rock Falls, we made the grueling drive back. Seriously, if I close my eyes it feels like my brain is moving. I don’t like it. We were starving at this point because it was after 6 and we really hadn’t eaten, so we went to dinner at my favorite sit-down restaurant, Han-nah’s.

The internet has been down at Midas for like 3 days, so we went to Hode’s to get some drinks and bum from their wifi. I can’t believe it’s my last night. I haven’t given it much thought because I don’t want to. I love my students and I hate saying good-bye ALL THE TIME. But like I said… it’s an unavoidable part of the bittersweet life of a nomad.

Horse Sex & Cow Trucks

Life in San Ignacio certainly hasn’t changed since the last time I visited in 2011. It’s just as chaotic, hilarious, frustrating, and a little ridiculous. On Tuesday morning, I lectured on reproductive anatomy and physiology. Just what I love talking about: genitalia. It went a lot better than I thought it would, especially since the slides were totally different than the ones I was given. Miss Kim lectured on stuff about the dairy industry. She’s a nice lady who is pretty quiet and very friendly, but for some reason she annoys the fuck out of me. It’s a little preposterous, honestly… but when she does things, it’s always in a really weird and awkward manner. Like the bathroom thing from Monday. What the hell was that?

So the lectures got done a bit early on Tuesday, so we went and hung out at Midas for an hour or so and then we went to get lunch at one of my favorite taco stands in San Ignacio. It’s essentially impossible to spend more than 5 $USD there. Tacos are 3 for 1 $BZE. That’s 50 cents US for 3 tacos. They also have a variety of fruit juices and my favorite drink that they sell, horchata. It’s a creamy drink made from rice and it’s flavored with sugar and cinnamon. It reminds me of chai. They also have some wicked hot sauce. It’s the kind of hot that isn’t even spicy… it’s more like a chemical burn that makes your face go numb.

After that, our afternoon lab was at BAHA—the Belize Agricultural Health Authority. It’s kind of like the Belizean equivalent of the USDA. They process almost all of the veterinary samples (blood, feces, etc.) in Belize, since vet clinics really don’t have diagnostic tools in house. I was kind of zoning out for this because it’s stuff I’ve done a lot in previous jobs and in labs in vet school. I do always enjoy practicing blood smears. One can always improve in that department.

We got out at a decent time that afternoon compared to the previous one where we were in the clinic spaying and neutering into the evening. As we were leaving, the funny little Belizean man who led the fecal exam station asked if he could hitch a ride into town with us. We had an interesting conversation with him about homosexuality in Belize that was sparked by passing the offensive King Jesus church sign again. It’s pretty clear just by talking to this man that it’s really not acceptable yet at this point to be gay in Belize. The things he was saying were clearly out of a lack of exposure to gay people and perpetuation of homophobia by Belizean men. It’s not his fault… it’s just how it is. He said that it’s not uncommon to find gay men dead in the streets or in burnt down houses, especially in or around Belize City. It made me sad.

This is not an uncommon perception of homosexuality around the world. I worked with highly educated Malawian professors last summer in India who were extremely anti-gay. Being gay in Malawi is literally punishable by law there. As in simply BEING gay. A man holding hands with another man is a federal offense. I had a many a conversation about this with my Malawian buddy, Oliver, on long van rides across southeast India.

He asked us if we knew where Miss Kim lived. I almost made a smart ass comment, but luckily I didn’t.
“How do you know Miss Kim?” I asked, amused.
“She is my wife!” he responded.
I thought to myself, “Good thing you spared that comment about her meandering off in this direction every day after class.”
Again, I don’t know why the woman irks me so much. I think the main issue is a language barrier or something, although I’m pretty sure she’s been speaking English for years. It’s just the weird things that she does. It’s now becoming a snowballing effect of GTFO.

She asks if I need help, which I rarely accept because when I do… something fucking stupid happens. Like I asked her to draw up ivermectin & dewormer and she wandered off in the middle of the field and started slowly drawing up meds. I just don’t understand.

Moving on.

Tuesday night was just a chill night. We hung out by the pool and ordered a pizza. Happy hour is every weeknight from 6 – 9, so we waited patiently for that. Unfortunately, the regular bartender wasn’t there and the substitute bartender made us drinks that could probably double as paint thinner. Liat got a drink that is essentially a pina colada and it came out the color of a marigold crayon. Does not compute. I wanted to try a grasshopper, which should be a creamy & minty drink. I got a transparent, lime green drink that had the faintest whisper of peppermint and a strong blast of dirt. So weird. DOES NOT COMPUTE.

I woke up on Wednesday morning to a van that wouldn’t start. I eventually got it to start, then a random guy started waving at me from the window and yelling, “You can’t drive the van like that!”
I slowly rolled the window down and looked at him like

He pointed at my back tire.

And I’m like…

And then I was told that there wasn’t a spare tire, so we called for a new tire and we walked to our third day of lecture at Sacred Heart. This time, I did two different lectures: one on artificial insemination and the other on diagnostics & physical exams. Miss Kim lectured on a couple of things. One of them had a significant proportion in Spanish.

Meanwhile, Ruben walked over and flagged me out because there was a horse emergency—a nasty laceration. How did it happen? It’s a mystery, but it appears to have happened on a stump or fence post. Shocker. So Ruben wanted to invited us to follow him out there and help stitch it up. Sounds AWESOME, right? Well… unfortunately the van was out of commission. I called to see if the van was done and I was told that it was. Ruben gave me a ride back to Sacred Heart and we saw that the van only had three tires on it and the entire thing was propped up on a jack. So it was NOT, in fact, finished. To top it off, there was a goddamn spare tire attached to the bottom of the van that I could now see in plain view without the tire.
“I could have just changed that out for you, you know,” said Ruben.
Me:

And to top THAT off, whoever came to fix the van took the tire with them and all of the parts that could have been used to attach the spare tire to the van.

So we missed the emergency. God damn shit.

It’s okay, though (I guess), because the afternoon was really cool. We went out to a horse farm to teach the students how to do a physical exam. I also taught them how to give injections. The physical exam is the most important skill a veterinarian can have. You can be smart as fuck, but if you don’t conduct a thorough physical exam, you can miss something really stupid. It was fun teaching the students how to do this. The farm was really pretty and out in the middle of nowhere. It’s called Whistling Duck Farms and it’s owned by a woman who moved to Belize and now takes in rescue horses because it’s actually somewhat affordable here. Somewhat affordable.

After all the students got a chance to do two equine physicals, we got a tour of the rest of the farm. There was a two-week old foal who is going to be a beautiful horse one day.

Beebee! ❤

After the tour, the owner looked at her guy that does most of the caring for the horses and said, “So are we going to do The Jump now or later?”

None of us knew what The Jump was. I started thinking of things that it could be and my mind kept going to this horseman doing tricks for us on a pony or something.

Nope.

By The Jump, she meant that we were going to watch two horses banging. A natural breeding. A live cover. Doin’ the dirty. Natural breeding like this is becoming increasingly rare in the United States. It still happens, obviously, or we wouldn’t have such severe equine overpopulation. It’s estimated that there are about 170,000 unwanted horses in the United States. That’s a lot, especially given the cost associated with owning a horse. This problem was really exacerbated when horse slaughter became illegal in the United States in 2007.

Yes, folks. I am very pro-horse slaughter.

The number of horses slaughtered after that point didn’t decrease… they just started shipping them to janky slaughterhouses in Mexico on grueling, long, hot, stressful trailer rides. I can say with near certainty that the destination awaiting them upon arrival was certainly not a nice one.

Slaughterhouses in the United States are governed by the USDA and overseen by USDA-employed veterinarians that keep an eye on animal welfare throughout the slaughter process. I can’t even imagine what an equine slaughterhouse would be like in Mexico. Fucked, probably.

What’s the alternative? People with too many horses that live in overcrowded fields, tied to random shit, and don’t have access to veterinary care because cost is such a limiting factor. As I said, horses are expensive. Even the euthanasia and burial of a horse costs HUNDREDS of dollars. I have friends in the “horse world” who tell me that horse owners lock their pastures at night and their horse trailers at shows NOT to prevent theft of any kind.. but to prevent people from stuffing unwanted horses in there when nobody is watching. Seriously. It’s fucking rough out there in the world of unwanted horses. Artificial insemination is becoming the norm in the US [which is good to control breeding], but not in Belize. Natural breeding is still very much a thing.

I can tell you that I have never seen two horses having sex. It was a little frightening, honestly. It was kind of violent. A mare in heat was put in the middle of the corral and a young stallion came RUNNING in with her and just took it immediately… but not before the mare give him a good kick to the chest first. Me and my six students watched in awe of what was happening before us. I’m not sure awe is the right word for what I was experiencing. I don’t know if there’s a word for what I was experiencing. Shock, mostly. I’m pretty sure I just laughed the entire time with my hand over my mouth like a 13 year old boy seeing boobs in a movie for the first time.

Then the sex jokes started. What else can you do in that situation besides make sex jokes?

Whoa, Nellie

The entire act was probably over in less than two minutes. We found out it was his first time ever with a mare. The jokes started cumming. [See what I did there?]
One pump chump
He just lost his v-card
Normally, you do a couple rounds of natural breeding, but the poor guy couldn’t get the job done a second time. So embarrassing when that happens.

The mare was ready for it, too. I’ve never seen a mare in heat before. It was… weird. They call the characteristic sign for a mare in heat “vulvar winking.” Because her vulva… were… winking. DISGUSTING. But it really was happening. There was also a lot of… stuff just squirting out at random. #traumatized #CantLookAtHorsesTheSame

…or look at winking the same.

Next, they let the stallion’s brother in there and he, too, got his chance and got the job done.
Oh, now they’re eskimo brothers too!

After we got our fill of intense, frightening horse sex we went to dinner and then went home. We decided to have “Wine Wednesday” and watch Once Upon a Forest, which is a movie that I used to love when I was little. Liat did too, apparently. We both had soap bars with little Once Upon a Forest characters inside of them. We both also knew a lot of the movie script. I found this hilarious. The movie is actually really quite disturbing. It’s funny how disturbing a lot of kids movies were, but I was totally and utterly unfazed by them at the time.

Wednesday was our final lecture. The rest of the course will be entirely practical stuff. Today we went out to a beef farm. Beef cattle are my favorite, so I was excited. I taught them how to give IM injections to fractious beef cattle. So fun. Beef cattle are the best of all worlds for me. Wild animals (bringing in the exotics side) that are still cute cows. Beef cattle are crazy though, because they’re essentially only handled by people a couple of times a year. Whenever you work with them, you have to be ready for an adventure because they really put up a fight. And these are all Zebu breeds, so they’re extra feisty. It went well, though… and it was a lot of fun.

I forgot to mention a very important detail about the morning. The farm was about 90 minutes from San Ignacio and the roads were horrendous. Ruben wouldn’t even let me drive them. When we were in the vicinity of the farm, the van broke down. It overheated and stalled.
Ruben: Did you put water in it?
Me [stammering]: What? No? Why the fuck would I put water in the van?
Ruben: You have to put water in the van.

I’ve never encountered a van that required I put water in the area of the engine, but apparently they do it with this van because they don’t have coolant.

Did I mention that this van is ghetto and needs to be euthanized?

And we didn’t have cell phone service.

Stranded.

We put water in the van and got it to go a few yards in between stalls, where we found a farmer.

This fuckin’ guy

We needed a ride to the farm, so he said he’d head back to the farm and get a vehicle so we could take us back in his truck. He came back almost an hour later with a cattle truck. Let me clarify: we rode in the back of his cattle truck like cattle on “roads” that were not even two-tracks.


… And it was so much fun!

So after we got to the farm and gave the cattle their injections, it was time for lunch. I brought stuff for us to all make PB&J and the farmers made chicken soup for everyone. Everyone that eats meat, that is. He also gave us other good stuff to try, like fresh coconuts and other local fruits that grew on the farm. I loved this day. We just spent a couple hours hanging out on with everyone on the farm drinking from coconuts, lounging in hammocks, eating, and catching chickens.

It was great. On the way back up to the van in the cattle truck, we took the scenic route and drove through the land where the cattle roam free. It was so beautiful. I want to live in Belize more and more every day. I could honestly see myself living like this. I feel like I can see myself having a future here, maybe.

We got to the van and it actually started. The farmer followed us down the bumpy hillside road in the truck in case the van stalled again and we’d be left without service. Luckily, that didn’t happen and we made it back to Midas issue free! Just to be safe, I took it in to get looked at to be sure all of the car-things-I-don’t-know-about were in order.

Everyone that looks at the van is like, “Nope. Nothing is wrong!” Well, it overheats and stalls and fails to turn over and the doors don’t unlock ON A REGULAR BASIS. So I’d say it’s completely fucked. But that’s Belize! It’s kind of what I love about Belize. People are so laid back and know that what needs to get done will get done… eventually.

I used to be such a control freak and it’s astounding how much I’ve changed. I can see my students looking at these things, worrying about how we’ll get home, and thinking, “How do people live this way?” And I sit there chilling on my hammock, drinking coconut water, and nonchalantly throwing my bread crumbs at chickens like, “What? We’ll get home eventually.” Of course we will.

One day we’ll all be found
No longer lost, we’re just hangin’ around
One day we’ll all be found, found, found,
Found, found, found

Jank x 10^23

The last large animal session is officially up and running. Well, maybe not running. Maybe more like stumbling or limping a little bit. But it’s going! It was a pretty good first day.

So, yesterday I was laying around by the pool doing nothing at all. I was informed that Dr. Tesecum would be stopping by Midas to talk to me about the plan this week between four and five. I assumed this was Belize time. It actually wasn’t. Seriously at 4:00 on the dot, I came up from under water in the pool to see Ruben standing there like, “We’ve been trying to call you for a while now.” That… doesn’t happen often. t hurried up and got dressed, then went with Ruben to Dr. T’s ranch to talk about the week.

Sunday is a day for family here in Belize. The ranch was filled with Dr. T’s children, siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews… not to mention at least 8 dogs.
“Are all of these yours?” I asked. In reference to the dogs, not the children.
Dr. T gave me a HELL NO look and pointed out his four. One was a five week old Blue Heeler puppy that was basically the cutest thing ever. There was one weird looking little male dog; he looked like a cross between a really small Irish Setter and a dachshund. He was just walking around, mounting other dogs, and starting shit.
“Who’s is that?” I asked.
“I don’t know where that one came from. He snuck in here while the guinea hens were locked up.”
Guinea hens are a weird looking kind of poultry species that are really territorial and eat farm pests like snakes and ticks. They’re not really used for meat. They will, however, chase dogs off the property.

My favorite part of being at Dr. T’s ranch were all the kids. Dr. T has four—two daughters and two sons. Ruben has one daughter—Judy. I also met one of Lourdes’ daughters. They’re all between the ages of like three and nine; they are all hilarious.

Love these kiddos.

The first one that I met was Ernest, Dr. T’s seven year old. I told him I wanted to see his quails, so he walked me over.

Ernest: How old are you?
Me: Twenty-five.
[Ernest turns around with furrowed eyebrows, appears to be surprised and/or puzzled by this response]
Me: I guess I’m pretty old.
Ernest (sighs): I know.

After we were walking around by the poultry, all the rest of the kids came down and started asking me if I knew Paige and a variety of other past ISIS students. I explained that I go to school with Paige and she’s one of my really close friends and they were so excited. They love her. They like to tell me who their favorite people are, in order of ranking—as in who is their number one favorite, their second favorite, their least favorite, and so on. All of this was happening while they led me around the ranch and asked me to help them climb trees. I think I had a small child holding almost every one of my fingers on both hands. Ernest was telling me that he likes to pretend to be a monkey. Judy’s response was, “You’re too fat to be a monkey. You’re definitely a gorilla.”

Kids are mean.

Then, they took me over to see their horses. Meanwhile, a small group of dogs came by with that one problem humper stray dog. He kept climbing on top of other male dogs that were three or four times his size and humping them in inappropriate places in front of the children.

Judy: Look! He’s gay like me! We both like boys.
Me:

must change subject must change subject must change subject

The bigger dogs would periodically get pissed and attack the smaller one, shoving him off. The little one would continue to hump the air, which the children very much enjoy.

“What is he doing?!” they kept asking me.
“Um… I think he’s dancing or something,” I would respond.
Judy loved that and every time he would hump the air, she’d give me a high five.

air humping, all right!

The dogs fighting kept scaring Dr. T’s littlest daughters, who have got to be like three and four years old. They’re seriously the cutest little girls I’ve ever seen. They look like little Mayan dolls with huge, beautiful brown eyes. The littlest one started crying, which allowed me to carry her up to the house and remove myself from the awkward, probing questions about what makes one “gay,” a “lesbian,” or why the little stray dog was doing that to other boys.

As soon as I got up to the house, I was ushered back into the car with Ruben to go look at a dog that got hit by a car. It was bad. The injuries were not immediately life-threatening, but the prognosis was not good… especially here in Belize. Both forelimbs were not usable… one because of a fracture right at the elbow and the other because the extensor tendons to the paw were all severed. The tendons to one of the back paws were also severed. That’s bad. Especially the elbow fracture. You can fix these things with surgery, but it would be expensive and the owner would have to be extremely dedicated. Even with owners in the United States, this repair would have a pretty good chance of failing. It was pretty clear that this animal was considered to be more of a “pet” than most dogs, but he definitely roamed the streets.

In the end, the decision was euthanasia but it took a fair amount of convincing. The owners were pretty convinced that a long-term regimen of pain medicine and antibiotics would fix the dog. Meanwhile, the dog was struggling to get up with tendons that couldn’t bear weight and an elbow joint that was just flopping like a wet noodle.

Did I mention that veterinary medicine is very often heart-breaking? Be nice to your vet. They may have just walked out of an exam room with a similar scenario just minutes before you decide to cop an attitude at them about how long you’ve been waiting for your simple annual vaccine appointment.

On the way back to Midas, Ruben asked me if I wanted to go to the fair with him and his cousins. Except when he said “fair,” it sounded like “fear” to me and I made him repeat it like three times before I understood what he meant. He said it was a fun party. By fair, he meant the Benque Fiesta. It’s an annual carnival that lasts one weekend in the town of Benque. It’s right on the Guatemala-Belize border. I thought it sounded like an interesting time and I generally don’t say “no” to potentially weird experiences, so of course I agreed. #YesMan

He arrived at Midas to pick me up at 8 and I found myself in a car with Ruben and four other Creole-speaking Belizeans. I can usually understand Creole for the most part. USUALLY. But here I was, driving in a car with a bunch of people I really don’t know at all to go to some sort of carnival.

Livin’ like Larry.

So we got there and, yes, it was a carnival. It was really crowded and full of food tents and drunk people. There were people of all ages from small children to teenage girls in prom dresses to old men. There were hundreds of people at this fair and straight up, I was the only non-Belizean in the entire place. To be more precise, I was the only white girl in this entire place.

And the fair consisted of two things: gambling and janky rides.

The games were funny to me. The first game I saw was quite simple and involved a glass bottle and a pair of scissors. You had to take the scissors and get the bottle to stand up straight without falling over to the opposite side.

My biggest concern: wtf is that power adapter there for?

The carnie at this station picked me out of the crowd. I stuck out like a sore thumb, so it was bound to happen. He let me try it. I lost on the first try, but he told me to try again and I WON! He handed me a fifty dollar bill and I was so excited… but he snatched it out of my hands and said, “Try again! Five dollars!”

It was really fun… and got progressively funner as we continued drinking. I couldn’t convince Ruben to go on this really fast ferris wheel with me, so I got his cousin Phillip to go. It was hilarious and scary because the rides all looked old as fuck. A lot of the children’s rides looked straight-up retro.


After the ferris wheel ride, we got really into riding rides and we went on a couple more. We even convinced Ruben to go on one with us. Only at a carnival in Belize can you go on rides while drinking beer and smoking cigs.

me & Ruben

drinkin’ beer & smokin’ cigs on carnival rides– right on brother.

It was all pretty disorganized, so we found a way to sneak onto a different ferris wheel-type ride. I didn’t want to go on it. It was sideways and looked particularly nauseating. I agreed, though. As we were sneaking onto the ride, Ruben’s cousin Andrea stepped on the wooden steps to get on and the board snapped and she fell through it, hurting her knee. We all immediately looked at each other and unanimously agreed, “So, yeah… no more rides, then?”

WTF

We hung out for a long time, just drinking beer and eating cheap tacos. I have gotten way more brave with the food thing. Last time I came to Belize, I soaked my produce in fucking bleach. Now I’m eating $1 tacos from carnival food stands. Worth it.

I didn’t get back to Midas until almost 1 am, despite the fact that I had to lecture in the morning. It was such a fun night, though. I’m so glad I went. Phillip said he was proud of me because [and I quote] I “can hang.” He said that most white girls that come to Belize would be nervous or uncomfortable at such an event. It’s probably true. This carnival was crazy and hilarious. Being the only blonde white girl makes you kind of a spectacle. Drunk dudes from all angles. Ruben and his cousins were always there. I feel like every other person at the fair knew Ruben or were related to Ruben in some way. It was a great night.

This morning, on the other hand, was a cluster fuck. The van is broken, so we walked to the school where we’ll be having our lectures. No big deal. It’s not far. It was, however, HOT AS HELL outside this morning. By the time we completed the ten-minute walk to Midas, I was drenched with sweat. It wasn’t even 9 am. Cool.

I had to somehow get into our classroom, but the security guard was nowhere to be found and I don’t have a key. Cool.

I did find Lourdes and I eventually tracked down the security guard who let us into the room. We had a projector for the lectures, but couldn’t figure out how to get past that infuriating screen that says, “no source detected.” Cool.

There’s a veterinarian here from the Phillippines named Kim. She’s been out of practice for almost 10 years now and is looking to get back in the swing of things, so I had her do the first lectures of the morning. Halfway through the morning, we broke for a bathroom break or whatever. I don’t know where the bathrooms are. I asked Kim since she’s been here all summer now. She kept telling me she knew where the bathrooms were, would gesture for me to follow her, then start wandering aimlessly not unlike Dorie in Finding Nemo when she forgets that she’s supposed to be leading Nemo’s dad somewhere. This happened like four times before I started getting annoyed. I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from saying something like…
“Do you or do you not know where these bathrooms are?”
OR perhaps something along the lines of…
“Do you or do you not have a head injury?”
I was pretty sure I understood what overall direction she wanted me to go in, so I took it upon myself to find the goddamn bathrooms. COOL.

I found the cafeteria along with some people who had the combined IQ of a grapefruit.

HI I’M EARTH HAVE WE MET

I eventually found a goddamn bathroom my students could use. How hard is it to show us where a goddamn bathroom is? Urge to kill rising.

Soon enough, the morning lectures were over. Because we don’t have the van and it’s hot as fuck, we walked up the road a few buildings and found a little taco restaurant to eat lunch at. After that, Demetria needed to head into town to get something so I walked with her. We stopped at a couple stores and found a guy selling homemade soursop ice cream from his bike, so we got a cone from him for a Belizean dollar (aka 50 cents US$). It was so good. I love weird food. It was ice cream with huge seeds in it. Soursop is a known neurotoxin, but is also renowned for its “healing powers.”

CHELSEA’S TOP 3 FAVORITE THINGS:
1. Food
2. Sleeping
3. Booze

After lunch, it was my turn to lecture on suture patterns and direct the lab, where they got to practice doing the different patterns on dead chicken.
Do you call it dead chicken?
It was the chicken that you eat.
Chicken meat? Chicken breast? Salmonella?
Regardless, it was really fun and it’s incredibly reassuring to be able to actually teach these things to people! I was surprised how much I could remember without having to look at something to guide me. We went over four different patterns in depth as a group: simple continuous, simple interrupted, horizontal mattress, and the cruciate pattern. Then I turned them loose after each demonstration and watched them at work. It was a little daunting at first because I forgot how awkward it was to learn how to use surgical instruments. I remember I used to have the OVERWHELMING urge to grab things with my hands. I got over that REAL quick with my amazing and beratement-prone mentor, Dr. Schuiteman.

Demetria and her sutured chicken. Love her.

Immediately after the lab, we walked over to Dr. T’s clinic next door. He had a bunch of spays and neuters waiting for us. The students were surprised to find that THEY would be closing the cutaneous layer of all surgeries. Demetria and Liat were first; they walked in just as Dr. T was finishing up the first spay. He handed Liat the instruments and walked out of the room without saying anything. That’s pretty much his tactic: sink or swim. He’d check back periodically, plus they had me and Ruben there to make sure they were doing everything correctly. Just like the spay & neuter clinic the other weekend, I was so proud! It’s extremely scary doing something on a live animal your first time… especially with everyone watching you.

That progressed quickly.

Just to build on that, I neutered a dog again. This was the biggest dog I’ve ever neutered. Bigger dogs have bigger testicles, require a bigger incision, and require WAY more force when ripping. I fumbled my way through the entire procedure. I’m so happy to say that I don’t get nervous in surgery anymore. I’m sure I will be when I have to do something new… but neuters are pretty simple now. I fucked this one up real good, though. Nothing really went wrong; it was just awkward. The first thing I did was hesitate while making the incision, causing a small cutaneous artery to start spraying into the air… and onto Ruben’s white and yellow shirt. Smooth.

Then I struggled with closing the inner tissue layer. I can’t tell you how many neuters I’ve watched in my life, nor can I remember how many I have done myself. I’ve done two in the past two weeks. Those are really the only two that I have done since I started vet school. Everything before vet school doesn’t really count, honestly. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. Let’s be real. Although I know with absolute certainty that I can neuter a cat unassisted in less than five minutes. A chimp could, to be honest… so I shouldn’t be so proud.

Hopefully I can do more neuters this weekend at another spay & neuter clinic because I need more practice fer sher.

After the surgeries, Ruben took me back to Midas to get the van. It was returned from the mechanic. This van is famous for being a piece of shit. Infamous, really. Paige fought many a battle against this van because it would fail to start, overheat, or just die at least once a week. If not more. It’s janky. It’s ghetto. It doesn’t have a rear-view mirror and the windshield is shattered. The brake pedal makes a loud hydraulic-like sound when you push it down. The air conditioning doesn’t work in the back when you exceed 50 miles per hour. Also, I found out this evening after dinner, you have to be a sorcerer or fucking Aladdin or something to get the doors to unlock. So there we were after dinner, in a dark parking lot, trying to get in the van to go home and none of the doors would unlock. We tried for about 10 minutes. Apparently Liat had the magic touch and the key randomly worked in the back door on the passenger side. That was the first of what I’m sure will be many battles with that fucking van.

This is going to be interesting. And by interesting, I mean a shit show.

Omar once made a happy meal cry.

It feels so good to be in San Ignacio. I love San Ignacio. I’m familiar with San Ignacio.

Five of my students left on Saturday morning: Nikki, Brooke, John, Rachel, and Kaitlin. It was weird and made me feel sad all day. I didn’t like it.

Again, that’s the bittersweet thing about traveling a lot. You meet these great people, bond with them, and have adventures with them… and then they’re gone. I’ve met a lot of amazing people this summer that I truly enjoyed being around, but may or may not see ever again. It sucks quite a bit and I get sad about it every single time, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s a beautiful and reassuring feeling to form such transient yet real bonds with these people. It’s reassuring in the sense that it reminds me every time that there are these wonderful people in the world that you don’t even know exist. As you go through life, it’s like a really hilarious and intense scavenger hunt in which you never know who or what you’re looking for. I live for it. I love it SO much, despite the sad part at the end when you have to say good-bye. But you have to do it eventually.

We didn’t say good-bye without a proper farewell party, though. We had our own little ISIS pub crawl on Friday night and it was awesome. It started at Cheers, where we took a coconut rum shot (because rum is the cheapest thing here). After that, we immediately went to Amigo’s and hung out for about an hour. Big Cat Zookeeper Tim showed up and told us we should go to a new bar that just opened up. Cheers is okay. We love Amigos. Both of them, however, don’t count as Belize bars in my opinion. The real Belizean bars are so much fun. Real Belizean bars are loud, janky, and full of drunk Belizeans. The third bar we went to was a real Belizean bar. It’s run by the guy who used to be the head bartender at Amigo’s, but he got fired for some reason. Then he opened this bar. I don’t even know if it had a name. It was in a rather unappealing little building with essentially no decorations on the walls, and counter with a wooden shelf behind it containing approximately 12 half-full bottles of liquor. Your main choices were Belikin beer (a Belizean brand) something with rum in it. Everything else was double the price. That’s typical though. Rum is dirt cheap here in the Caribbean.

Zookeeper Josh (the guy that got attacked by a tapir and took me and Paige around the zoo last weekend) was DJ’ing… on his laptop. I’ve really grown to like the Latin music they play here. It’s kind of hard to be sad and listen to Latin music. This bar also had darts, pool, and a hammock. The main decoration at this bar is three or four strips of red and blue christmas lights outside. We discovered it the day before, pulled up to it in the van and thought, “The fuck is this ghetto place?” Then we drove away. It just appeared out of nowhere. It just opened a few nights ago .

We had a blast at the bar. The zookeepers were there, the night watchman from TEC, one of the young staff members at TEC, and a few other Belizean men. One guy had a braided ponytail that would make Rapunzel jealous. He was clearly hammered and stood there doing pelvic thrusts to the songs he liked. People were dancing, playing cards, and I personally really enjoyed playing dominos. They take it very seriously at this bar. When your turn came around, you’d aggressively slam the tile down as hard as you can with a very serious look on your face. It’s only impressive when you know the rules of the game, though. I’d slam a tile down with the most intense look on my face and one of the guys would respond with, “No… no, you actually can’t put that there.” and hand the tile back to me.

It was a great last night together in the jungle. We decided that Omar is the Belizean equivalent of Chuck Norris. He’s a jaguar researcher, if I haven’t explained that before. He researches wild jaguars by humanely trapping them and putting radio collars on so they can be tracked in the wild. He camps out in the jungle with his research team and checks his traps periodically throughout the night. The traps are simple rope snares… nothing that hurts them. And they check them so often, that the jaguar won’t be stuck in a trap for longer than 30 minutes. He’s told us stories of wild jaguars lunging at him and shit. Nothing makes Omar feel threatened. So yeah, he’s the Belizean Chuck Norris. We started making Chuck Norris jokes, but replacing it with Omar.

Omar doesn’t sleep— he waits.

Omar puts the laughter in manslaughter.

Omar doesn’t do push-ups. He pushes the whole world down.

We got home at around midnight, then went to the dining hall to drink the rest of our beer and use wifi and whatnot. Juan, the night watchman came out. “We’re hungry, Juan!” I said. “Do you have any snacks?”

“I can probably find something,” Juan said.

He made a multiple course meal. First, he made fucking tamales for us. After that, he brought out a meat plate. It was a pile of breakfast sausages and bacon. Obviously I didn’t eat it, but I can appreciate the humor in a meat plate. Then he brought out scrambled eggs. Then he brought out cookies. I couldn’t have asked for a more satisfying array of after-bar drunk food. Plus, the meat plate was just awesome.

MEAT PLATE

After we ate, we continued talking to Juan for a while.

“So, is there really a village beyond TEC?” John asked in reference to our stupid van adventure earlier in the day.

“Yes,” Juan replied. “It’s about seven miles past here. There are bad people there.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Juan didn’t say anything. He merely made a throat-slitting gesture with his thumb across his neck.

…okay

Eventually, we went to bed. It was a great night.

Cynthia arrived at around 8:30 the next morning to take people to the airport. Paige left, too. Sad face. Then me, Emily, Megan, Demetria, and Liat caught the bus to head out to San Ignacio. My response to buses in Belize are not unlike my response to airports: pure unadulterated rage. I get crabby at the mere thought of riding one. People are pushy and have no concept of etiquette. Whatever. It’s the drivers that are the most annoying. They always tell you the bus is full, but let Belizeans on anyway. You can’t stand on the bus… unless you’re Belizean. Belizeans just push their way on. I can respect it, I suppose. I do it too, now. I shove through and yell at people who piss me off. Sorry, not sorry. It doesn’t help that the buses are shitty old school buses with vinyl seats that stick to my legs and are just jam-packed with sweaty people.

The bus before it got crowded

I told the bus driver TWICE where we wanted to go: once when we got on the bus and again when we stopped at the bus station in Belmopan. I told him approximately where it was and what other buildings were near it. I asked him an obnoxious number of times if he understood what I was talking about. I was on a crowded bus and couldn’t see out the windows very well, so I needed to be sure he knew where I wanted to stop. On top of that, the aisles are full of people so the driver can’t see you when you’re standing up with intent to get off AND there are no such thing as those cables you pull when you are making a stop request. Sweet.

We were going to see Dr. Isabelle. She was MY teacher for the wildlife course back in 2011. She has since moved onto other things, but I wanted to visit her. She won a grant a few years ago and built the Belize Wildlife & Referral Clinic just outside San Ignacio. It’s state of the art as far as clinics go in Belize. There’s gas anesthesia, an autoclave, an x-ray machine, AND an x-ray developer! It’s also air-conditioned. All of those things don’t exist in a veterinary clinic anywhere else in the COUNTRY of BELIZE. It’s pretty amazing. Isabelle is inspirational to me. I can’t even imagine how much time and energy she has put into all that she’s accomplished. I want to be HER when I grow up. I either want to be a mixed animal veterinarian out west who works primarily with feedlot beef cattle… OR Dr. Isabelle.

After we were on the bus for at least 90 minutes, I saw that we had entered the village of Esperanza. It didn’t seem right. I asked all of the Belizeans around me where we were and if they knew where the Belize Wildlife & Referral Clinic as and no one knew. I called Isabelle and she told me that we passed it by two miles. I saw red.

“Fucking asshole bus driver,” I thought to myself.

“STOP THE BUS!” I screamed. Literally screamed. Liat had her iPod on and heard me yell plain as day. I’m extremely loud. I inherited trait that from my father.

I shoved my way up the aisle FULL of people, gestured to the other four girls to get off, and got in a fight with the bus driver and some woman who was essentially sitting on his lap the entire time.

“Why didn’t you stop, dude?” I asked. “I told you twice where I wanted to go!”

The bus driver shrugged.

“I told you where I wanted to go, man. What the hell?”

“I’m not going to remember that,” the driver said plainly. His lady started yelling things at me and I gave them the most intense mean mug I could summon and got off the bus in the middle of nowhere.

Isn’t that a bus driver’s job to remember where I want to go? It was really difficult for me to not point this out to him. Especially when I told him twice? It pissed me off A LOT. It didn’t help that I was already hot, sweaty, and pissed off from the ride. It felt good to yell at someone. I just needed a reason. So thanks, I guess.

So here we are, in the middle of nowhere. Well, we were in a village. Next to a church run by a minister who goes by “King Jesus.” He had an extremely offensive sign above the front door of his church. Take a look:

I’m not even gay and this offended me.

As we were standing outside, we could hear King Jesus on a megaphone yelling, “Come inside girls! Come inside!”

We sure as hell didn’t go inside.

We told Isabelle about this later and she said King Jesus is a real scheister. He has been jewish, atheist, and now King Jesus. He also sells furniture and appliances. Isabelle said she bought a washing machine from him, supposedly new, which broke down within a couple of weeks. When she went to get it repaired, the repairman told her the washer was like forty years old.

Fucking King Jesus.Further proof that not all “Christians” are good people. And not all good people are “Christians.”

We started walking in the direction of Isabelle’s clinic, hoping that we’d see either a cab or a bus. A van cab drove by eventually and I started waving my arms and yelling, “Come back!” I felt like Rose hailing a life boat on Titanic. They actually turned around and took us to Isabelle’s for 2 $BZE each. Nice.

Dr. Isabelle’s clinic

It was really cool to see her again. As I said, the clinic is amazing. It’s also funny because it’s in a building that was once a small airport, then an ice cream factory, and now it’s a clinic. If you think about it, a food factory is a great place for a clinic because it’s full of surfaces that are easy to disinfect. She had quite a few animals in there that we got to see. An adorable baby kinkajou, injured turtles, and some very young baby $#$#@)#$s. We got to hold them, medicate them, and bathe them. So cool.

Then she took us up the road to the wildlife preserve across the street, where she houses other patients from time to time. There was a toucan up there with a broken wing. We watched Isabelle do physical therapy with him… which is basically chasing him and making him fly around the cage for wing exercise. Also a squirrel that has been released, but he comes back to eat papaya from time to time. The owner of the property had some peccaries. Peccaries are basically Belize’s wild boar species. There are two species in Belize. One of the peccary species is known to be aggressive and dangerous. They travel in huge packs and will chase down people and kill them. Pigs are fucking crazy animals. They kind of freak me out.

peccaries

Afterwards, Isabelle gave us a ride to Midas. Beautiful, beautiful Midas Resort. I appreciate being here SO much after living at TEC for two weeks. TEC isn’t bad at all. It’s actually really fun… for a while. After two weeks, though, it starts to feel like too long. The bugs, the heat, the humidity, etc. Midas has air conditioning and a pool and internet that usually works. I have my own adorable little cabana. It feels so good to be here.

I live here now.

We just checked in and relaxed in the comfort of our new Midas home. I drank a couple beers and laid by the pool. I needed this.

I also got to meet two new ISIS students- Arin and Amanda. Arin is a second year veterinary student from Ontario Veterinary College… so she’s just as far along as I am in school. And I’m gonna be the TA…? Weird. But it’s really cool to have someone to talk to who understands the struggle of vet school. It’s so real.

This morning, we had breakfast at Midas and walked around San Ignacio. The girls are all out on a tour of Xunantunich. What am I doing? I’m writing this blog in my air-conditioned cabana and after that, I’m gonna go lay by the pool and drink beer.

Life is good.

The first rule of mud-bogging: never slow down.

Warning: this blog is a record-breaker for rambly-ness. I don’t censor the flow of thoughts as they flow from my brain into this Word document. I’m Jim Morrison and you’re the Ed Sullivan Show.

Fun fact: the Spanish version of Breaking Bad is called Metastasis. It was on at Amigo’s last night. I find that quite morbid. For those of you non-medical people, “metastasis” is the term used for when cancer spreads throughout the body. As in, “the cancer metastasized from the pancreas to the lungs.” In the bottom left corner of the TV screen, it said #metastasis. There was a Walter White lookalike. His name was Walter Blanco. I’m demented, so I found it funny.

So we survived the night at Cockscomb Basin. In the morning, we went on a hike at the jaguar sanctuary. Cockscomb Basin was the world’s first jaguar sanctuary. I found out what the name of the husband and wife were that owned the place that we stayed at: Ernesto & Arora. Ernesto was the first director of the jaguar sanctuary, so I guess he’s a pretty big deal around those parts. He’s the one that led us on our hike.

I’m not gonna lie, I’m starting to reach my limit with the jungle. It’s great, but in bursts. I could never live in the jungle. I’ve been totally immersed in the jungle for two weeks now. Like, totally immersed. In bugs, mostly. Our only break was the one night at Midas and the other night at Tobacco Caye. There are ALWAYS bugs within view. Huge spiders pop out of unexpected places and run at me. A spider the size of a ping pong ball ran out of my goddamn refrigerator last night. Fucking seriously. Buzzing insects get stuck in my hair. A termite literally got caught in my eyelashes one day. Paige witnessed that one. And I’m always sweating profusely. I have a wide variety of different kinds of rashes and hives. I have phantom insect bites. Even when I’m not getting bit, it feels like a mosquito is biting me every two minutes or so.

I’m so ready to live in San Ignacio. Midas is calling my name.

This hike we went on was very cool. It really was. But this was my third night of less than 5 hours of sleep and it was SO muggy. And buggy. It was so muggy, that my clothes were essentially damp within minutes of getting out of the van. I love biology and ecology, but GOD DAMN. Ernesto seriously stopped every ten steps to point at something. We knew that the end destination of our hike was a waterfall and swimming hole. It took every ounce of self-restraint in my body to stop myself from yelling, “HOW MUCH LONGER?!” But I didn’t. That would be really rude. Everyone felt the same way. It was almost palpable.

It took over two hours to get to the waterfall, I’d say. Don’t get me wrong! The hike was gorgeous. The forest was dense and looked like a never-ending rainforest cafe. That’s seriously what I think about whenever I’m in the jungle. Stupid, I know. But it’s true.

We finally got to the waterfall and it was awesome. Liat, Brooke, and I weren’t wearing our bathing suits under our hiking clothes (because that’s gross, in my opinion.. bathing suits are NOT underwear), so we had to go up the path a little ways and get naked. It’s really hard to get undressed swiftly when you’re drenched with sweat. I almost lost my balance and slid down the side of the steep, rocky, mud-covered hillside while ass-naked from the waist down. That would be so sexy. Omar was up the hill on a different part of the trail and I was just waiting for him to walk over and see us all in this unflattering position. But we managed it and I jumped in immediately.

It was wonderful. One of the most refreshing swims I’ve ever had. The water was cold. Beautifully cold. And NOT salty for once. So nice. I just floated on my back and looked up at the canopy for a bit before joining everyone else under the waterfall. It was really nice and it made me feel so much better. I felt totally rejuvenated for the hike back.

We went back to the cabanas for lunch. Before I ate, I went to talk to Arora because she has self-proclaimed psychic-like powers. It didn’t cost a lot of money, so I decided to see what she had to say. I always do these things. I’m agnostic, so things that have to do with religion and afterlife and spirituality all seem like interesting stories to me. I love talking about religion and spiritual beliefs. I’m not an ATHIEST. Don’t get it twisted. I think that the human life force is something too strong to just disappear into nothing at all. It just seems weird. I don’t believe in a being called God. I don’t believe in heaven or hell. I don’t know what I believe in. That’s what agnosticism is. I do believe in people. I do believe in souls. I believe in love. I believe that bad people get what they deserve and that good people deserve good things. I believe in myself. I believe in being a good person because I WANT TO BE— not because I’m scared into being a good person. That all sounds cheesy but I don’t know how else to word these brain things.

And it’s not depressing. Everyone thinks it’s depressing not to believe in a place called heaven. That it’s depressing I don’t take comfort in the fact that after I die, I’ll be welcomed into some kingdom where I’ll be happy with everyone I’ve ever known forever and ever. It’s not depressing at all. I think it makes life that much more special, really. I think that it means you have to appreciate everything you see and experience as much as you can in any given moment because everything is temporary and life is so fucking short. Like if you are walking around outside and see a really bad-ass tree… I stare at that bad-ass tree and think about how cool it is because everything is temporary and you might not get a chance to see a bad-ass tree like it ever, ever again. That’s a hypothetical bad-ass tree and it can be replaced by any other bad-ass thing you can think of. Sunsets. Babies. Flowers. Kittens. The view of Rio de Janeiro from the top of that mountain with Jesus on it. A jaguar skull. A group of vultures fighting over a garbage can [I saw that yesterday… It was entertaining].

Jaguar skull = bad-ass

If you see something and you like it, stare at it for a while because maybe you’ll never get the chance again. Maybe there’s no such thing as everlasting life and we’re all just going to exist in the now. I like to live like that’s the case and be a good person because I want to be. So stare at the goddamn bad-ass tree, okay? That’s all I’m saying.

How the FUCK did I get here?

Seriously, you can stop reading my blog any time now. I promise I won’t be offended.

So where I was going with this was that I stopped to talk to Arora the psychic Mayan descendant lady. She does crystal ball readings. I wanted to see what she had to say. Liat did it, too. Liat and I are incredibly similar. We both deal with things that a lot of people don’t understand. Mainly depression and other mental issues that stem from it. I have cyclical depression. It gets really bad sometimes. Sometimes I stop eating and don’t get out of bed until 8 pm. It’s not because I’m sad. It’s because I lose the ability to care about anything at all. But that’s only sometimes. Most of the time, I’m fine and I’m normal.

I’m telling you this because Arora told us similar things. Not the same thing, but similar things. But it fit me. She told me that darkness follows me. That she can tell I’m depressed and I don’t let people get near me. She said there’s “a person that I keep pushing away that I should let into my life.” She was speaking in reference to my love life. I’m thinking, “Um. You’re gonna have to be much, MUCH more specific.” I’ve done that to every gentleman that I’ve seen in the past two years. You know that whole “you’re smothering me” excuse? It’s my go-to and I fall back on it usually, oh, within a week or so. She told me to stop being sad. I told her, “I’m not sad. I don’t feel anything at all.” And she just looked at me with a disturbed look and said, “Oh.”

All of these things are true. I didn’t like to hear it. It made me feel weird. SO I left Arora’s reading feeling weird and kind of catatonic, honestly. OH! I also left with a bag of bark she told me to make tea out of and it would cure my depression.

It’s weird because I love my life. I have no complaints. I go through numb periods. I call them “dead inside” periods. And that’s depression. It’s a disease. People give me advice during “dead inside” periods to “do things that make me happy,” but they don’t understand the problem. It’s not that I’m sad. It’s that I lack the ability to feel anything at all. If anything, it’s confusing. Maybe a little frustrating. Not sadness. But I’m not dead inside right now. I feel exceptionally alive, actually.

I’m generally only dead inside in late winter. I also usually become dead inside for a bit in September. Not in the summer, though. I’m great in the summer.

Speaking of not being dead inside, we just got back from a really stupid adventure.

Today was our last day of class. The students did their presentation on a Belizean animal of their choosing and they all did really well. I sucked at presentations when I was in early college. I didn’t get good at public speaking until after I was pre-vet club president my junior year.

We got done at like 10 am. Then we went to the lunch, went to the gift shop at the zoo, and were just gonna sit around at TEC until dinner. I don’t know if I have mentioned, but TEC is about a mile down a two-track road that you turn on off the Western Highway. When you reach TEC, the two-track continues on.

I asked Omar (or some other Belizean— I can’t remember for sure) where that two track went. They responded with, “A village.” The students and I were intrigued by that, but never explored it further.On our way back from lunch, John looked at me and said, “We should find that village.” I responded with, “I like the way you think.” 

I’m so happy I had all nine of the students in the van for this adventure. It wouldn’t have been even remotely the same without everyone being there.

We kept driving for a few minutes and saw nothing but more two-tracks coming off of the original path. “Let’s just turn down one of these,” someone said. I picked a random one. It had a dilapidated gate that I believe originally blocked it off, but we just kept going. A little ways down, we came across a burnt-down building. We thought there had to be more, so we kept going. A few hundred yards past it, we saw an adorable little concrete pagoda-looking gazebo and a footbridge surrounded by what appeared to be a manmade pond. The pond was a weird opaque sea foam green color. There were ornamental palm trees planted all around it. And that was it. In the savannah in the middle of nowhere. It was surreally beautiful. We walked to it and took pictures, then got back in the van.

…What is this?

Still no village.

We turned down another two-track. It wasn’t the original two-track we vowed to take in the beginning, but for some reason we chose it.

It was a poor choice.

Soon, the path got EXTREMELY narrow. And muddy. We were talking about going mudding just minutes before that. It was a favorite pastime of ours in my high school days back in Alpena. I used to do quite a bit of mudding in my little jeep liberty. I buried it on more than one occasion. I once tried to drive through a pond with cattails. It didn’t work. What did I learn from my years of backwoods mudding? That the first rule of mud-bogging is “never slow down.” I told my students that and I’m fairly certain they think I’m a redneck or hillbilly of some kind. They also tell me I have a strong accent, which I’ve never known about myself. I was told that when I lived in New Orleans, too.

So after this mud-bogging talk, we came upon some mud. Deep mud and A LOT of it. And nowhere to turn around. Then the van got stuck. Then the tires got buried.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Everyone got out to push, but it was just burying more. We put logs behind the tires and it didn’t work. I was already rehearsing in my head (a.) how the fuck I’m going to explain to people how to find us and pull us out and (b.) how the fuck I’m going to explain to people WHY we were back there in the ISIS van in the first place.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“You should just floor it,” said Nikki.

We really didn’t have any other options. It was either that, and maybe bury it even further and make the call of shame OR simply give up and make the phone call of shame. Either one would probably result in a phone call of shame.

I floored it.

It moved.

We got out.

I found place to turn around. It was narrow and scary, but we did it. Then, I had to get through the mud again. We decided that the best plan was to have everyone remain out of the van, and walk up to a wider area and stand to the sides while I floored the van through the 3 areas of deep, sticky mud.

I rolled down the window and looked at John to say, “Livin’ like Larry.”

We were all just laughing at this point as everyone walked up to a safe spot and flagged me onward.

LOLOLOL

I hit the gas and hauled ass through the muddy areas until I reached a dry spot on the other side. Everyone got back in. We looked at each other silently and just burst out laughing.

That was a team-building experience if I’ve ever seen one.

As we pulled back into TEC, we agreed: “So… never speak of this again?” 

So the moral of the story is that I’m fairly certain there’s no village back there.

And that I’m highly responsible.

Livin’ Like Larry

The past few days have been action-packed and adventure-filled. On Monday night, we went on a night hike at Runaway Creek. The bugs here give me major anxiety, but it ended up being one of my favorite things so far. We went in a couple different caves in the middle of the jungle. One of the caves actually had Mayan paintings in it. The second cave was way bigger and we could walk quite a ways inside of it. My emotional state of being fluctuated quickly and violently between being totally in awe of my surroundings and being totally terrified due to my surroundings.

It was awesome because it was filled with awesome stuff like bones from jaguar kills—we saw two peccary skulls—and adorable baby bats.

adorable widdle bat

There were also terrifying things like pseudoscorpions.

HELL NO. Bigger than my hand.

They’re actually giant spiders, so they may be pseudoscorpions but they certainly weren’t pseudodisgusting.

There were also HUGE crickets and HUGE bugs flying at my face. I hated those things. I can’t react to HUGE things flying at my face in a calm, collected manner. I tend to just punch spastically into the air.

On the way back through the jungle at the end of the hike, Nikki and Kaitlin heard a sound that they described as “dripping water.” They looked down on the path and saw a huge ass snake. Omar told everyone to stay calm and keep walking because it was a fer-de-lance… a venomous pit viper found in Central & South America. It’s known for being particularly aggressive and defensive.

Once Omar said that, people just kind of started scattering and freaking out. Snakes don’t bother me for some reason. A fer-de-lance is a different story. John turned to me and said, “Livin’ like Larry.”

“Livin’ like Larry” has become a phrase that we utter during times of adventurousness activity. It’s a SpongeBob reference, actually. It’s an episode that I’ve actually never seen. I love a good SpongeBob reference. My sister and I still watch old recorded episodes from the late nineties. That show is funny as shit.

The episode that “Livin’ like Larry” comes from is one that SpongeBob and Patrick try to live like Larry the Lobster and do a bunch of adventurous things like skateboard down mountains and stuff, but they just end up getting injured a lot. So when we find ourselves doing ridiculous shit here in Belize, we’ll say “Livin’ like Larry!” and it’s funny for us.

We got back from the hike and went to bed early because we had to get up the next morning for mist netting at 4:30 am. To go “mist netting” essentially means to trap birds in a net. It’s a really fine netting, hence the “mist” nomenclature. Birds fly into it, get trapped, and then you can take them out and put a leg band on them. It’s a research technique. We left TEC at 5 for Runaway Creek. Just 30 minutes after we opened the nets, we got like 5 birds. They were cute. I don’t know what kind they were.

After that, a couple of the students started feeling sick and I took them back to TEC early. I was okay with that, honestly. One session of mist netting is enough for me. There were a shit ton of bugs out there swarming my face and flying into my hair. They were definitely of the Hymenoptera family… the family that has bees, wasps, and ants. No thank you. I’m in vet school now and I’m soOoOoOooo over the whole “doing research” phase. Not for me. I hate doing research and never want to do anything like it again.

After that, we went back to TEC and got ready for our trip out to Tobacco Caye. We stopped in Belmopan to eat lunch before we drove to Dangriga to catch a boat out to the island. The drive was really beautiful—through the Maya Mountains. It was also pretty anxiety-inducing for me, as the driver. There were extremely narrow bridges, hairpin turns, and semis. Lots and lots of semis. But after about an hour of this, we got to Dangriga. There was a little motorboat waiting for us… and a really tan guy with a lot of tattoos and a strange accent named Michael. We asked where he was from and his response was, “All over.” It turns out Michael and his significant other, Mel, are the new proprietors of the Marine Sanctuary at Tobacco Caye. They’ve only been there for two months. We waited at the dock for about twenty minutes for our captain to arrive. Soon enough, a Belizean wearing a captain’s hat arrived, who also appeared to be stumbling. Clearly this was our captain.

The boat ride out to the island was about 30 minutes and I really enjoyed it. Then we arrived at Tobacco Caye. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It was amazing. The island is barely bigger than a football field, has no vehicles of any kind (not even golf carts), and no streets whatsoever. It’s seriously just an island peppered by small houses randomly placed on the sand. Most of the people that live there are fishermen and their families… and then there’s Mel & Michael. I always thought of Caye Caulker as the most laid-back place I’ve ever seen—this made Caye Caulker look like a big city.

Arriving at Tobacco Caye

When we got off the boat, we were given our room key. Us girls got split up into two 6-person dorms. John and Omar got their own. It was very modest. Bunk beds, hostel-style bathrooms and showers, and a tin roof. You could hear bird toenails walking across it. The entire island runs on a generator that turns on between 5 pm and 5 am. Every day after 5 am, there’s no electricity. The water on the island is supplied by rainwater and is collected in big black vats.

Cabanas & rainwater collection vats

Once we got settled in, Michael gave us a tour of the entire island. It took 15 minutes. There are two cabana “resorts,” two bars—but only one is open, the Marine Sanctuary headquarters, and a bunch of fishermen homes. It’s such a cool place. The fishermen come in everyday and clean their catches, so there are mountains of conch shells all around the island. I stole one for me and one for Paige. All around the island, you can see the barrier reef about 100 feet out from the shore. Right after the tour, we had a little “lecture” with Mel about the hazards you can find in the reef. This new wildlife course is definitely not for pussies. At TEC, we’re getting eaten alive by insects. At Tobacco Caye, you have to watch out for fire coral, hydroids, anemone, lionfish, jellyfish, scorpionfish, and a variety of other “stingy thingies,” as Michael put it. You can’t touch the bottom. You can’t touch the dock posts underwater. You really can’t touch or accidentally brush up against anything. Period. Most of these stingy thingies are very well camouflauged and hide in the sand. In reference to the scorpionfish, Mel said, “You won’t die. But people who have experienced it say they wished they had.”

Livin’ like Larry.

After that delightful talk, we were dismissed to roam around until we heard the dinner bell—a triangle. I walked around and took pictures for a while because everything about this place was seriously SO cool. There are seven dogs on the island and everyone knows their names. There were also a bunch of really friendly cats that would follow you around and try to sneak into our cabanas if we weren’t looking. Three snuck into Liat’s bed and slept there all night. One jumped onto Megan’s bed and when it moved, it left a little bloodstain. So a cat snuck in and bled on her bed. She moved to a different bed.

After 20 minutes or so, I heard the dinner triangle ring. The cook at our lodge hand-made us dinner and it was awesome—really flavorful rice and barracuda with steamed broccoli & cauliflower. After we ate, the night was our own. There was only the one bar, so we knew what we were going to be doing. And then the night turned into a shitshow.

the only open bar on the island

When an island is as small as Tobacco Caye, everyone hangs out in the same place. It turned out that a group of human medical students were also staying there for the night. They were funny and not bad to hang out with, but I really didn’t like them that much. I got a douchey vibe from them from the beginning. Mostly because they were all macking on my students and they were all my age or older. Plus, they were typical pompous asshole human medical students. No offense to any medical students reading this, but many of human medical students that I have met have been kind of dickish. Yes, human medicine is cool and very important. Yes, you will have plenty of money. We KNOW. There’s just the common perception that human medical students have to be so much smarter than veterinary medical students. We have the exact same pre-requisites. We go through the same amount of graduate school. Human doctors have to do a residency and we don’t. That’s the main difference. But at this point in the game, a third year human medical student is no smarter than a third year veterinary medical student.

I have been in situations where I’ll be in a group of people and one of them is a human medical student. Everyone oohs and aaahs over the human medical student. “Did you have to get, like, a 4.0 to be a doctor?”
“Medical school? Wow, that must be so hard!”
Then people turn to me and say something like, “It must be so fun to work with puppies all day.”

WE ARE MEDICAL STUDENTS TOO. In fact, there are less than 30 veterinary schools in the entire country. We have a shit-ton of human medical schools just in Michigan! There are hundreds in the country. I’m just saying they’re both hard and it’s fucking time veterinary students are recognized for that. It’s all I ask.

Ridiculous Side Story: After a particularly rough pharmacology exam, my dearly beloved vet school friend Jessica and I drank our feelings and went to a punk rock concert. At the end of said concert, we got in a fight with a medical student who said the exam was probably only difficult because—and I quote—we were veterinary students. Two seconds later, she was on the ground because Jessica stiff-armed her and she landed swiftly on her ass on the pavement. We looked at each other, burst out laughing, then ran away screaming “GO! GO! GO!” Not the most mature way to handle a situation like this, but in a nutshell YES. That’s what we want to do when you canoodle over human medical students and look at veterinarians and describe us as “cute.”

So I heard one of the medical students say something along the lines of blah blah blah Why would you do that much work just to work on, like, pit bulls all day?

So that was really what sparked me. That and the 25+ year old guys shamelessly hitting on 19-20 year old girls thing. The age difference isn’t that astounding, but as the TA I was just sitting there like…

I felt really old during this entire thing, by the way. Really old.

We all drank together and had a lot of fun. It was a great night, despite the confusion that seemed to explode out of thin air. We were taking shots. That was the first mistake. Once people started getting drunk, everyone started scattering about the island. Despite the fact that the island is the size of a football field, people went missing. I couldn’t sleep knowing that two people were missing, so all of us ISIS students scanned the island multiple times before they finally turned up. It turns out that they were sitting on a bench with one of the medical students. During this process, we took turns getting mad at each other. ISIS student on ISIS student, ISIS student on med student, etc. I got in a guy’s face because he called me old. In the end, it was a hilarious night that just got really weird.

As the TA, apparently it was also my job to get everyone hung over for snorkeling the next morning at 6:30 am. We had our tutorial with Michael before breakfast. After breakfast, we got on the boat for an entire day of snorkeling.

The snorkeling in the more popular cayes that I’ve been to is more eventful with big sharks and stuff that swim up to you, but the snorkeling around Tobacco Caye was more interesting and beautiful than anything I have ever done before. We started in the mangroves and then made our way to the reefs. I’ve never snorkeled in mangroves before. It was weird and AWESOME. Mangroves are saltwater-tolerant trees, in case you didn’t know. They have roots that come out of the tree and project out into the water and just dangle there. In these little mangrove coves, you get a pretty dense and unique little ecosystem. The roots are covered in colorful sponges, tunicates, weird worms, and other stingy thingies. On the bottom of the water are things that you CAN NOT touch. They’re upside-down jellyfish. Jellyfish have a two-stage life cycle. The typical jellyfish that we think of is the free-floating form. That’s for reproduction, mainly. Most of the time, jellyfish are actually lying on the ocean floor on their “backs” and don’t move. They really just look like anemones, but they’re really colorful and if you look closely you will see them pulsating.

upside-down jellies

They sit like that and wait for prey to swim into their tendrils so they can sting them, paralyze them, and eat them. It was really cool to see. The mangroves were sweet.

sponges & stuff on a mangrove root

After the mangroves, we made a stop at a really cool area of the reef and swam around. Then we drove the boat by Man O’ War Caye which is also known as the bird caye… because it’s covered in birds. They’re frigates and boobies to be precise.

Man O’ War Caye

After that, we stopped at Saltwater Caye and ate lunch. Belize has over 200 different cayes; most are uninhabited. It was fun seeing more of them. We hung out at Saltwater Caye for an hour or so and swam a little bit before going back out to snorkel some more. We stopped at three more places and then went back to Tobacco Caye to get ready to head out.

I didn’t want to leave. It was so nice and relaxing there… and there weren’t bugs. We were all SO happy.. and the saltwater also made my insect bite wounds happy. It literally stung to put my limbs in the water. That’s how bit up we are.

We got back, showered really quick, and got back on the motorboat to return to the mainland. We drove about 45 minutes to get to our next stop—Cockscomb Basin. It’s the most active jaguar sanctuary in Belize.

I heard about the place we’re staying at in Cockscomb from Kelsey and other ISIS students who came here. I was told that it’s worse than TEC… like bug-wise. When we first pulled in, I was like “What the hell were those pussies talking about? This is adorable!” Because it is adorable. It’s obviously rustic, so I thought that’s what they were talking about. It turns out that the insects aren’t the biggest issue.

It’s the fucking ARACHNIDS.

I DON’T DO ARACHNIDS.

Everything was fine until the sun went down. We ate dinner, which was prepared for us and it was fantastic. After dinner, I hung out in the dining hall with the others. We were so happy. John was being a fucking dork and doing magic tricks [which I love wholeheartedly, for the record] AND we had wifi. What a surprise. After a little while, I had to return to the room to get my computer charger. Nikki, Brooke, Demetria, and Liat were in there and they didn’t look happy. “There are six fucking spiders in here,” Brooke said. “So nobody open this bathroom door.” Right after she said that, a HUGE one crawled out from under the bathroom door and sat in the corner by the door to the outside and would spazz out if you got near it. At this point, I’m just like, “Fuck this! Fuck this! Fuck this!” Nikki asked sadly, “Can we sleep in the van?”
“Of course we can sleep in the van,” I said. “I’m sure as hell not sleeping in here!”
My mood was instantly changed. I entered fight or flight mode. I don’t do spiders.
“There are tarantulas everywhere,” Nikki said.
There are tarantulas everywhere. And spiders. You can shine a flashlight out across the grass and see dozens of tiny diamonds. Those are fucking SPIDER eyes. A lot of students were concerned about this. Some wanted to sleep in the van. Others didn’t, but they were scared to sleep in the room. One person wanted to go back to America. At this point, I put on my big girl TA panties and asked for the manager. I felt bad because they’re really nice, but it had to be done.

This place is owned by a husband and wife. The wife is really cool and makes all these herbal cures for stuff. She also does massage therapy and reads a crystal ball. She’s famous in Belize and even has a published cookbook that has won awards that are recognized even in the United States. So it’s pretty cool!

It was the husband that I talked to. He seemed really concerned, so he took us to a different room… but he said, “There are spiders in there too. There are spiders everywhere. This is the jungle. They’ll just crawl under the door and come in. Tarantulas too. They’ll all come in.” He said this in front of everyone. As I looked around, my students just had this blank stare. It brought me back to my horrible, horrible big-infested experience at TEC three years ago. I was miserable and angry and terrified.

Are you happy, John? I worked in PTSD dog.

My response: “Okay! This really isn’t helping.”

The poor guy was trying so hard, though. I felt really bad. We made him follow us into the new room, turn on the light for us, inspect all corners with a flashlight, open the shutters, pull the beds away from the corner, then follow us into our old room to turn on the lights and stand there watching as we removed our stuff like a bodyguard in case some spider came out to attack us.

My students were freaking out. Not just about the spiders, but about the overall cleanliness as well. They handled it really well, though. Liat thought she got bedbugs at TEC and doesn’t know what to do about it. We showed them to the couple and they insured us that they weren’t bedbugs. “They’re chiggers,” the husband said. “They are absolutely chiggers. They come out of the grass and crawl up onto your legs and suck your blood until you shower.” It makes sense. She got them one day after an early hike. She just thought she woke up with them. We’ve been trying to diagnose this issue for days now. Liat was pretty convinced they were bedbugs. I got bedbugs last fall when I lived in the ghetto. It looked similar, but none of the other girls in her cabin had the same bites so it didn’t seem to fit in my mind. In my situation, anyone who spent the night at my place got bit up as well. It sucked. But that wasn’t going on here. Chiggers are much more likely. Liat was pretty freaked out and they made us feel a lot better! It was magical. The wife gave us some of her homemade herbal cream for bug bites and we just sat there and talked to them for a long time. The husband took us out and showed us how to shine the grass for spider eyes, which was both disturbing but oddly comforting in a way. He also showed us how many tarantulas there are. They literally line the sidewalks. There are holes everywhere and if you shine your light in there, you see legs and chelicerae.

NO.

It’s disgusting, but also oddly comforting in the same weird way. I don’t know why, but talking to them made us all feel a lot better. I was pretty worried for a second there. For real. I had students panicking and saying they wanted to go home. But somehow, it ended all right. We went to bed laughing about how unfortunate we are in this very moment.

Mosquito nets

Yes, there are little flea-like insects crawling around on my mattress. Yes, I’m sleeping under a mosquito net. Yes, we’re sleeping with the lights on. But it’s better than 8 girls sleeping in the ISIS van. I guess I can do this after all.

Motherfucking. Living. Like. Larry.