The Calvary Arrives, The Lake and Barrio Dogs Get Done and I Contemplate My Future.

Prelude - The Sound of One Hand Clapping.

Donna and I stop for food during our barrio runs. We’re sitting around waiting for our food and watching the people at the next table drink. There’s a ton of wasps around and they complain. The waiter comes back with a can of Raid, sprays the tables, drinks and all, and goes back to what he’s doing. The drinkers go on drinking. Donna and I watch this devoid of shock or anything.

Welcome to Nicaragua. Who wants some Raid with their beer?

I can’t say much about it. I’m wearing surgical scrubs with dubious stains on them, some of them fresh.

We’re not having a Big Talk but we are having a talk about what happens when I go, how she wound up here being the busiest woman in Central America, about her stint in Peace Corps, a bunch of things. She’s been out of town, I was sick and traveling, I haven’t really had any Donna Time as of late. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I go back in July, I tell her. Figure something out, I guess.

Then why, she asks, are you leaving? Why not just stay until you figure it out? She doesn’t ask me because I’m invaluable, because Casa Lupita can’t live without me, she asks because it makes sense: why go back to someplace you don’t like with no real plan and very few obligations?

I don’t have any sort of good answer for that. I sip my soda and think and watch the drinkers at the next table enjoy their Raid-Enhanced Victorias. And I wonder about the difference between being useful and hiding out. And I try to ignore the fact that the wasps are fascinated by my scrubs and I am bee allergic.

The Calvary Arrives.

I get the message Friday: It’s Donna, can you call me about some big stuff that’s going on tomorrow?

It turns out that we have a tour group coming to the clinic tomorrow and Sunday. Four Costa Rican vets and eighteen vet students from the US. They can do surgeries. They can do just about everything. And they want to work.

Immediately we set to scrambling, trying to line up some animals for them with no notice. We’ll get the lakefront ferals Donna feeds every morning - the crew of dogs that turn up with the Potato. I have to go do an injection for a friend that runs a place out at Laguna. I tell her - they have two new pups, one of which is sick and needs the injection, the other which is healthy. Bring them both, I tell her. The vets can look at the sick one and we can spay the healthy one.

I go back to the lab that’s done all my blood work where the woman mentioned she had cats she wanted fixed and tell her. One of my neighbors has a dog that got hit and lost the use of it’s leg. I talk to Lilly and she goes to hunt her down to see if the neighbor wants the vet to see it.

Toni, Donna and I go to clean the clinic top to bottom. We recruit Allen, my roommate to come with to move furniture to make extra surgery stations. We set up stations outside, in the schoolhouse itself.

Toni and Nick are out of town for the weekend so I’m at the clinic at 6 AM the next morning to get our dogs taken care of and out of the way and do some last minute stuff to get ready. At 8 AM the a tour bus pulls up and we are flooded, flooded, with vets and students.

We have a few animals that have come in - the first ones in are my friends from the Laguna. Kit turns up with all of her neighbors animals, ready to roll. She has another friend that has neighbors needing the vets services. She takes off in her truck with him. The vets start and the students start doing intake on the animals, taking pulses, tagging animals. We divide the students into groups - nine in the morning, nine in the afternoon. We just don’t have the room for all of them. Some are dispatched with Donna to go to the lakefront and grab the ferals.

I am running around frantically finding catheters, needle tips, things they need. I help the vets muzzle a snarling dog, do holds for a few injections. Donna turns back up with a full truck - they got everyone but the Potato who is still considered too iffy to do right now, health-wise. We wrangle those dogs into cages, muzzling some of them.

On intake two of the lake dogs are throwbacks - they just gave birth and can’t be fixed. Dr. Tom will be here in June and can do them. Donna drives them back and releases them.

Someone has dumped two tiny kittens at Lucy’s hotel - seriously tiny kittens. They get examined, started on milk replacer. Kit agrees to nursemaid them for the few weeks.

At times on Saturday we have some downtime. I love the Costa Rican vets - they’re younger, funny, bright. Gabby has black scrubs and a cool hat. Not fair - I want black scrubs. Francisco is a geography whiz and during a moment of downtime we play quiz by the big map in the school yard. Kiribati, I ask. He knows where it is. He know the wheres, I know the weird facts about the places. We have a geek-fest next to the surgery tables.

The students are sweet, smart and want to work. They pick ticks tirelessly, cup after cup after cup of them. They do incredibly thorough workups on the animals, checking pulses, prepping, shaving. These animals, one of them says, are the worst ones we’ve seen so far, shape wise. It makes sense. They’ve been to a few countries on this tour but Nicaragua is by far the poorest. We do a lot but it is exhausting.

I was supposed to go to a party on Friday night but I skipped it because I knew Saturday would be an early day. Saturday night is my friend Katherine’s going away party. I go home dirty and tired but determined to go. I lie down on my bed without showering, set my alarm for an hour. A quick nap, up, shower and go.

I wake up at eleven that night, call Katherine and apologize, go back to bed.

The next day it’s more of the same - at the clinic at 6 AM. Our dogs know something is up and they don’t want to eat. They like the students, seem to be waiting for them.

We have an issue in that we have run through lake dogs, all the people we called brought their animals in yesterday. They start with spaying the Minnow and we go back out to the lakefront. A family that owns a restaurant gives us their one dog, covered in ticks and full of parasites. They don’t want it fixed, just sanitized, de-ticked, wormed. They have another one, a little one, also covered in ticks and full of parasites but they won’t let it come with us. We’ll have to treat it there.

We get a sarna stray that hangs out down by the marina. Those go back and are put in the queue, the students doing their workups. Meanwhile word has hit the streets and people from the neighborhood are bringing in their animals.

Donna has a school down in one of the poorer barrios and we head down there, bringing some students with us. The barrio folks want help for their animals. We get a one month old puppy, infested with fleas and ticks and bald in patches from health issues, a big older dog to neuter, some other tick infested animals, some younger dogs to spay. Another small puppy, this one covered in sarna and with wounds. We fill the truck, put animals in the backseat of the truck with the students.

A woman from a different barrio is visiting her friends - she wants her animals done but has no car. We go back to the clinic, unload, and head out to her barrio. More animals. A female dog for spaying. A male dog with a festering wound on it’s hind end. We drop the lakefront tick dog back with it’s owner, armed with a syringe of anti-parasitical for the small dog they wouldn’t let us take. The vet student holds it on a table and I inject it there. It’s a little bastard of a dog and it whips, almost gets me. We’re not going to sit there and pull all the ticks off of it but it’s something.

Katherine’s host family brings in their dog, a pit bull that has lost the use of it’s back end. They get a big cart and bring it over from blocks away. Gabby breaks away from the table to look at it, see if there’s anything we can do. Their other dog has skin problems and we give them meds for that one as well.

Someone discovers Porsha has an ear infection. One of the students sets to her ears with antiseptic cleanser and fluid. Porsha being Porsha, she bears up like a champ.

It is a flood - there are dogs everywhere, all of our cages and crates are full. The vets and students are working in triple time, de-ticking, fixing, doing wound care. Usually we keep count - statistics - on what we do but now there’s no time, just dogs.

A few of the dogs have erlichia and are bleeders. The sarna stray from the lake is a difficult surgery. She cannot be re-released that day and will have to stay at the clinic for the night. She’s too feral for us to feel comfortable leaving her as she is - she will either kick up a huge fuss or hurt herself trying to escape - and the vets inject her with valium.

Some of the barrio dogs are ready to go and we take some students and go to return them. My Spanish blows but the one thing I can do reasonably spotlessly is post-surgery instructions. We also give typed instructions to everyone but there are a fair amount of people in these neighborhoods that can’t read so we go over everything verbally. Most people won’t admit they can’t read so everyone gets verbal and printed. Some of the barrio dogs had infections - the dog with the wound, one of the spays had an infected uterus. We distribute medicine, explain dosing. Claudio, a bilingual volunteer, wrote out dosing on the pre-printed post-surg instructions but we go over these as well.

By 5.30 we are left with two dogs waiting to be picked up. Amidst much cheek-kissing and hugging the vets and students leave, exhausted. Donna and I clean up some, feed our clinic dogs.

Katherine leaves tomorrow and it’s my last chance to say goodbye. We had made dinner plans but we run so late that I have to meet her for dinner in scrub pants and the tank top I had on under my top - I have no time to go home and change.

I get home that night and take an enormous shower, change my sheets. I crawl into a clean bed , scrubbed off and smelling good, exhausted, drained.

Toda esta bien. It’s all good. We did what we were supposed to do. And we did it well.


Some photo notes: all pics taken with my crappy plastic Nicaraguan digital. First pic: returning barrio dogs at the end of the day. Second: Francisco and another Costa Rican vet work on a barrio dog. Third: three of the vet students do an intake on one of the lake dogs we had to throw back. Fourth: Vet student holds up the dumped kittens while Donna looks on. Fifth: Gabby, another Costa Rican vet, sans black scrubs but with cool hat works on lake dog with vet student. Sixth: Tick infested puppy. I spared everyone the close-up disgusting ear shot but every black dot is, in fact, a tick. Seventh: Porsha gets her ears done. Eight: Lake dog recovering from anesthesia at the clinic. Ninth: Ticky puppy gets a snack post tick removal and bath. Ninth: the last of the lake dogs - the sarna infested one that had to the spend the night - bolts as it's released back at the lake.