Procrastinating to tell a mouse story
The hospital is really busy right now (major surgeries booking into October), including lots of big patients (some have been bigger than me!) and that means the space is at a premium even just for me to walk around. But sometimes I need to do something other than sew and writing up the stories of patients is one of my happy procrastinations where I don’t feel too guilty for letting them sit. So thank you for being a reader, and letting me procrastinate with a bit less guilt! 😊
I have two recent stories I really wanted to share, so here is the first, the story of a mouse.
Unlike the patients above, Mouser is actually fairly small. Not tiny, but about ten inches tall. His person first wrote back in 2020, when Mouser was 29 years old. He had had an unfortunate run-in with a dog. Here are the diagnosis photos from then:
She also sent a photo of a similar (though not quite the same) younger mouse as a comparison:
We all know how 2020 went, so Mouser didn't come in then, but six years later (he’d been kept in a safe space all that time) his person wrote back. She was finally ready to send him to the hospital.
We agreed that the best treatment would be:
Repair muzzle with new nose
Repair arm with new hand pad
Of course, these were subject to change as treatment proceeded (and you’ll see they did a bit) but that was the plan.
He took a short flight down the coast from Washington and started his treatment with a gentle spa. Here he is in his bubble bath:
You can sort of see in the photo, he’s kind of a bluish gray, which I couldn’t match exactly for his new ears and back of his missing hand, so there were two choices for his human to choose from:
She chose the shorter fur and surgery proceeded. I had a really good match for his pawpads.
Here's his heart being made and installed with a bit of original stuffing:
And here were his initial chubbiness approval pics:
He still needed some new toes and fingers:
And then, he was ready to fly home! His person wrote: He looks amazing!
If you enjoyed this post, you may be interested in my substack newsletter, doctorbeth.substack.com. It's free, and you get the stories straight to your inbox. I also do occassional retro posts from the backlog through the newsletter. But don't worry, I'll keep posting everything new here too.
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