The Vets of Arusha

So, I am living in Africa with my aunt while I do school. I have always been interested in animals and thought that my job would be working with them, I had always thought of being a vet but it just was too much school and money for me to really consider or so I thought. My aunt knew the vet here in Arusha and asked if I could do stuff with them like volunteer but they laws in Arusha make it illegal for me to volunteer without a volunteers visa which I didn’t have so I thought that I wouldn’t get to help them, but then Marisa said that there was a way. We would just say I was observing and I could come and help/watch.
So on Wednesday I went to the vet clinic, the name is VetAgro, and helped them prep two dogs and two cats for surgery. They were just getting spade and neutered, nothing big. We started with a male dog; I even got to watch the surgery. I didn’t handle watching it as well as I had hoped, I had to leave part way through. I think it was the combination of the smells from the sterile chemicals, and the heat that made it so hard. The room was really stuffy with no wind coming in. I was worried that I just didn’t have the stomach to handle surgery, which made me a little sad and disappointed in my self. When they started working on the female dog, they opened the window and from then on, I was fine. It was incredibly interesting to see the different steps to the different sexes, the mail seemed harder to do then the female.
Then we started on the cats. Marisa had told me that the cart were a lot easier then the dogs, however they don’t handle being knocked out before the surgery so well, where dogs take it well and if they have eaten they throw up before they pass out cats will pass out and then try and be sick which means that if your not careful they could choke.
We started with the male cat and I was amazed to see that it was at lest ten times easier then the male dog. The whole thing took like five min. However, the female was a bit harder then was expected. The female seemed to have a lot of fat that made finding what they needed harder then it should have been, it took about seven or eight tries before they finally got it. After that it was only five minutes and they where done.
It was really interesting to have seen both sexes of both dogs and cats getting “fixed” because even though there body build might be similar they are still very different. After seeing that I started to think that maybe it was worth it to go to school to be a vet. To me, the joy of working with animals out ways the pain of doing all the school, and paying all the loans.