gross anatomy

*WARNING! this post is not for the squeamish!

Whenever you work with animals (or in the medical profession) you kind of have to have either a twisted sense of humor or a stomach of steel.
The other day I had two dogs to care for the day. The owner requested I just stay in her enclosed yard and play 'catch' with the dogs. She told me "not to worry about picking up their poop because that was her husband's job". I thought to myself, 'that sounds A-OK by me". I picked up the ball and tossed it in the yard for the dogs to retrieve.
The dogs gleefully ran for the ball but ended up missing it. They search for it diligently digging around in the yard but ended up missing it. I ran into the yard to get the ball for them.
The yard was a virtual mine-field of shit .
There wasn't a square inch in that entire yard that did not have some form of poop in various states of decay. I stopped short as if I was going to land on a detonated mine.
"Oh jeeze..I gotta go out there and pick up that nasty ball?" The dogs looked at me gleefully with the most filthiest faces and mouths you've ever seen.
I brought the dogs in and gave them both large bowls of water to rinse their mouths out.
The day before I took little Jackie the one-eye pomeranian out for his bathroom break. He's an elderly dog and much like an elderly man he has a tough time moving his bowels.He was squatting and pooping squatting and pooping all through the length of the driveway. I thought this was odd because this was unusual for him to poop continually like this.
It turned out he was pooping out bits of a (gag) tape-worm.
After a trip to the vet it appeared that he got the tape-worm from a flea-bite.
In a previous post, I wrote about how my goldfish got tape-worms too. They weren't as lucky as Jackie because they did not survive. After that incident I bought shoulder length rubber gloves to clean the fish tanks.
I am reading the book "The making of a Woman Vet' by Sally Haddock DVD.
Parts of the book I have to chuckle at because it sort of reminds me of my days in dental school especially the parts where they are viewing some pretty nasty slides and trying to sneak in eating lunch at the same time.
To this day, I can not eat anything that looks like yogert or cottage cheeze.
I will not go into why.
I can also understand ,like this veterinarian, how you dissociate yourself from your patient during surgery because if you didn't you would either cry, throw up or faint. I would go into surgical proceedures methodically as if I was working on a motorcycle.
I think I would've made a good vet.
I enjoy reading medical text-books for fun. It's really too bad school is so out-of-reach expensive.