Day 2 – Burns Lake BC

OMG – eggs benedict with smoked salmon.. fresh baked biscuits.. home made jams… sigh.. I think we are in heaven.

I can’t believe that I didn’t add Lorna’s name to the list of Team members on yesterday’s post!  Sorry Lorna!! Lorna is here as one of our assistants and our photographer.  She came here from Smithers, BC last year to help for a day or two, and got sucked in for the whole time!  So this time she actually planned to come for the whole trip.

Today was set-up day.  After breakfast this morning we loaded up the vehicles and headed over to the Grassy Plains Hall to set up our clinic.  The hall turns out to be a perfect location for us – lots of space, lots of lights, tables waiting for us, a kitchen, bathrooms, a covered porch for pets who have to wait outside, and lots of space outside for walking dogs.  This Hall has just about everything we need, and we all send out a huge “Thank  You”  for letting us use the space!

Our clinic set-up

We all got to work – deciding how to best use the space, the flow of the pets, where the perfect spot for our recovery area would be… We came to a concensus and started moving tables and putitng down tarps.  Once we got the tables set up and postioned, we got to open the bags.  For those of you not familiar with our trips, let me explain.  All of the supplies that we get are packed into enormous hockey bags and brought with us.  Everything.  Every needle, every glove, every medication, sharps containers, cold sterile solution, gauze.. everything.  A lot of stuff to unpack (and we aren’t even thinking about the re-packing when it’s time to go home!)  This trip we were a little spoiled as most of the supplies were sent up ahead of time so we didn’t have to carry them with us on the airplanes.  Four huge hockey bags, a portable anesthetic machine in its own suitcase, and a number of cardboard boxes were unloaded and emptied out so we could organize all the supplies and be ready to go.  Alistair was there making sure to fix everything just right – cutting wood to put under the table legs so the surgery tables would be the right height, attaching lamps to the tables, running extension cords, turning random hooks into IV poles.   Piles and piles of loaned pet crates arrived, at one point I’m pretty sure that Stapley and Shaena were trapped within the crate-mountain as they were sitting on the floor putting all of them together!

Our first surgery.

Dr. Liz suggested that it would be good idea to have a “run through” surgery to do this afternoon, so that our first-timers could see how everything runs.  We all thought this was a wonderful idea, and somehow Valerie and Allistair made a dog appear.  I told you – they can do anything. 🙂   Us, I’m not so sure about.  We were so sure we had everything when we left the house this morning.  Absolutely, positively sure.  Then the first question – how are we going to prep since we left all the gauze back at the house?  No problem, lets drive back.  Next somebody remembered that we hadn’t brought all of our anesthesia drugs.  Back to the house Alistair and Liz went.  Then we realized we hadn’t brought the vaccines.  Back to the house went Valerie.  The good thing was that all of that was worked out before Goldie actually arrived, so we were fine.  Goldie’s anesthesia and neuter surgery went perfectly, and we were raring to go!

“Goldie” and Stapley

So what does the team do after that?  Well, EAT of course!!  We had a great dinner made for us by Pam at Keefe’s Cafe.  Lasagna, garlic bread, salad. yum yum yum.

After dinner the next member of our team arrived – Jenn Buller from BC. I’m afraid she didn’t get much of a greeting from us – we kinda tossed her a box of now lukewarm lasagna and told her to hurry up and eat it on the way.  We had to go meet Larry.  Larry was taking some of us – Lorna, Kristie, Stapley, Shaena, Jen and Laura – out for an evening cruise on his sailboat.  Pretty spectacular.  The landscape is beautiful and we all had a blast listening to his stories of sailing off the coast down to Mexico and Hawaii.  I’m pretty sure that Larry had a good time too, even with our less-then-stellar preformance as deck-hands.

The last item on today’s agenda was a Team Meeting.  We basically decided that we are all awesome, this is going to be a great trip, we are going to get a lot of dogs and cats spayed and neutered, and we are going to have a great time here in Burns Lake!  🙂