Back Home safe and sound

Hello Everyone for one last email,

We finished our work at Taricaya on July 1. More than a few hours were spent pulling maggots out of a very sick sow; she had a massive eye infection (no eye left, no idea what happened) and a significant vaginal tear that was severely infected. With this loss of condition coupled with mastitis, she was no longer lactating. By the end of the week cleaning maggots and spraying the wounds with organophosphates (this is the norm there, it is amazing how quickly you start reaching for the "purple spray" when you have nothing else.), we spent our last few minutes on the farm watching her engulf a special meal of ground corn. A happy ending : )


VACATION! We spent the next four days hiking the inka trail to Machu Picchu. This trail can only be hiked with a guide and porters, as an attempt for preservation. Things I noticed about porters:

+ they run up mountains
+ they carry loads of supplies that often have dimensions larger than thier own
bodies
+ most of these supplies are completely unessecary luxuries for us tourists who are hiking the Inka trail - tables for example. i don't need a table when i am hiking the Inka trail, nor a chair, nor a different fork for my salad and dessert, heck, i don't even need dessert!
+ they run up mountains in sandals
+ they will stop and applaud hikers pass them on the trail, it's rare.


We then flew to Ecuador, and spent 8 days on a Galapagos Island boat cruise. The wilflife, history, and geological landscape is astounding. I will update my photos in the next day so you can get a taste for our experience, it is very difficult to put into words.

Our arrival home yesterday was gratefully met with friendly customs officers (i had a ton of brazil nuts in my bag, not sure if that's legal or not!?!?). Our voyage ended from where it had began, our lives profoundly different yet rushingly the same.

First stop: pancakes.
Second stop: sleep.

Thank you everyone, for accompanying us on this journey. I am certain to look back years from now, and identify our Global Vets experience as a defining time in my personal and professional life. I hope you have enjoyed our trip as well, thank you for all the emails to keep me company during our travels....muchly appreciated!

If you are in the guelph area, please email me or call me to hang out (519-651-3131, yes, i'm living with my parents because i have no money!). If you are not in the guelph area, please email me or call me to catch up!!

hasto luego,
cuidates,
Liz

This Week in Photos

Llamas and Yummy Potatoes

The following has been edited by me (Caleb), and is composed of emails from Liz.

Give Griff a big hug for me, I miss him a lot, especially because I can’t email of call him on the phone. I told all my friends about dad noticing Lucy’s eyes and we had a good laugh!

We treated more llamas and alpacas yesterday and then bailed hay. Bailing hay is really hard. We did get baked potatoes for lunch though, which I really enjoyed. After work we went to a hot springs near one of the university centres. Today we did ultrasound on llamas/alpacas for pregnancy, but they were all open. Then we did some GPS for one of the engineers who are mapping the area. After lunch we went hiking to this high altitude lake we had spotted on Sunday while hiking the mountain. Two school children cruised past us on the way up, and we felt pretty silly geared up in all our hiking stuff.

We are here until Tuesday when we will go to Cusco for a couple of days. We are just missing a huge festival there, which makes us sad, but our plane ticket cannot really be changed : (

I think we are all really missing food from home. There is a pasta place here, but pizza-pasta gets tiring after a while, and everywhere else is meat-ariffic. We ordered beans and rice at a restaurant the other day, but the beans were mixed with pork. We had been warned about that, but all our bean-rice meals until then had been meat free. On my first day back, I want a marinated tofu wrap from cornerstone. And popcorn. And garlic bread from Zehrs. And a huge stir-fry with lots of fresh veggies and tofu in peanut sauce with roasted almond slivers.

Oops, sorry, sometimes I get carried away.

Soon we are meeting friends from IVITA to go out before we leave for Puerto Maldonado tomorrow morning. The nightlife here is unbelievable, last Saturday we danced until 6:30 am, then took a 3-hour bus ride back to Merengani. I hope my Latin dancing is improving :P

We finally went shopping for souvenirs today, the only problem is I want to keep it all for myself! I really like bartering too, sometimes we get stuff for almost half price.... my mom would be in heaven.

Anyhow, gotta run. I don’t think we will have Internet access until we are back in Cusco on July 2.

Say hi to griffin for me!

-Liz

Tina, eat your dinner

The following has been edited by me (Caleb), and is composed of emails from Liz.

So forget being sick....lets fly from the coast (lima city, 43 feet) to Cusco city (11024 feet), and climb a mountain 2 days later!

Hiking a mountain yesterday was one of my favourite days of our trip so far. It brought me back to hiking in the rocky mountains three summers ago, challenging and satisfying - I think I am built to be in the mountains : )

about 8 hours total, 5 up plus about 2 hours resting along the way and at the top, and 2 hours down, reached town just before sunset.

The other girls headed back about 2/3´s of the way because they were really feeling the altitude....dizzy, chest pains, Amy had a black out or two :P I continued with the other Peruvian veterinary students, as we slowly plodded our way to the top. What a view! There is nothing quite like sitting on top of a mountain, in the sun, exhausted, and eating chocolate with good company.

They also have an interesting ritual. At the top, each person has a shot of zambuke (called anise here), but must pour a bit on the earth before drinking as a way to pay tribute. We lay in the sun, they sang Spanish songs, and I even fell asleep for a few minutes. It was bliss.

I will post the pics when we are in Cusco (next week on Wednesday I think). What a great time.

We also had a great day at work today. Oral anti-parasitic treatments for a herd of sheep (for future reference: the restraint method of making sheep sit really cute that we learn in clin-med is proportionally difficult to their size). Then the same for a herd of llamas. Unfortunately they don’t sit down. We have some great action pics! I now love llamas and alpacas. Then we were sent to help cut and bale hay. That was really hard. I mean, really hard. They cut the hay using small curved knives and we made tepee bales. Sounds easy enough, but it’s not.

Hope everyone is well, I miss you all!
Liz

Cruising Over Cusco

The following has been edited by me (Caleb), and is composed of emails from Liz.

We have just arrived in Sicuani, which is about 200 km south of Cusco. Cusco is really beautiful, even though we only saw it from the airplane and for 10 minutes in a taxi to the bus station. There are mountains everywhere here! The weather is closer to Canada...really warm in the sun, but chilly in the shade, the air is very dry.

We can all notice the elevation as well, especially since we are coming from sea level. My heart was pounding carrying my bag up the stairs, and Maria has been light headed. Sicuani is also the first place we have been that is not even a little touristic. We stand out even more that usual, if that was possible, but the nice thing is that instead of the usual stares and whistles/catcalls, people (especially kids) stop and say hi to us. Tomorrow we will go to Mirangani to find the llama-alpaca research station and start work.

We are all really tired, so don’t mind my rambling. We never seem to get any sleep the night before our morning flights. We got home about 1:00am last night, packed until about 3:00am and woke up at 5:00am - we were supposed to get up at 4:30am, but I slept through the alarm and was responsible for waking everyone up:(

Bacterial Enteritis

The following has been edited by me (Caleb), and is composed of emails from Liz.

I always figured that if one of us got sick from the water here, that we would have gross diarrhea for a day or two and then be back on track. It does not always work that way I guess.

Yesterday I woke up with a stomach ache. Convinced it was from not eating dinner the night before, I went for a run, and continued life as normal. On par for the day was isolating the skeleton after a postmortem on a Galapagos fur seal that died suddenly, and isolating the skull from an 8 day old dolphin head. Enough to make anyone sick I suppose!

I had a headache after lunch, so Maria gave me an ibuprofen which seemed to help. A few hours later I had chills, the kind where your skin hurts to the touch. Then nausea for a bit. I mostly thought I was being a wimp, since I do not get sick very often. By the time we arrived back at our hostel around 7:00pm, I figured I had better lie down.

Then the craziness began.

I don´t know how high my fever went, but my friends say I was laughing hysterically for almost half an hour straight, then singing songs such as "lunch lady land" by Adam Sandler, conjugating Spanish verbs (with good accuracy btw!), and staring at my hand for minutes at a time, bending a finger and saying "that finger, no, that finger". Oh, and the princess bride....talking about how kappybara´s are like the rodents of unusual size. And discussing how my parent’s phone number is like a pizza number.

2 acetominophens with codiene later, I came mostly back to the real world and went to the hospital. They said it is likely a bacterial infection from pretty much anything. I will take acetominophen and ciproflaxacin for 3 days and go back for blood work if my fever comes back. I wish we could culture, so I would know what is trying to take over my body.

I puked last night after the hospital, but I am feeling much better today. Some stomach cramps and tired, but I think the craziness is purged from my system!

On the upside, I think we will enjoy having a few days of rest. Our trip has been very busy so far. And I don´t really like decomposing dolphin heads anyways.

I hope you are all healthy : )

Liz

This Week In Photos

Hello,

Below is just a sample from the new pictures that have been uploaded to the Team Peru photo album.

Remember, to visit the photo album, head to photos.yahoo.ca and put in the username and password.

Enjoy.

-Caleb

Another not so quick update

The following has been edited by me (Caleb), and is composed of emails from Liz.

Hey everyone,

Thank you to Caleb for maintaining the blog, please visit the blog and the link to some pictures from the first part of our trip. I should be able to update the pics late next week when we get back to Lima.

I did my first spay! It was by chance on Thursday night when we were visiting the Australian vet at Amazon CARES shelter, after our day of work at the primate centre. She helped me through it and the street dog recovered fabulously, because she escaped the next morning! We are finishing our work at the primate place on Monday and spending Tuesday and Wednesday in the Berlen market doing sterilizations with Amazon CARES. (We have also been bringing cats from the primate centre to them for sterilization, it is quite an adventure to catch feral cats - everyone there has a good laugh at our expense!! ...but we have also found a home for one of them as soon as he is neutered- yay!). Last night, we were invited to a meeting between Beth the Aussie vet and several of the local vets. It was the first meeting to discuss sterilizing small animals in the Iquito´s area.... how, why, etc. There were some tough questions for Beth, I was glad to be a bystander :) This is a time for potential change here in Iquitos, and we are lucky to be even a small part of it.

BEWARE.... VET TALK TO FOLLOW!!!! In case any of you vet people are interested in what we have seen.....

In general, mange is rampant, and all parasites everywhere in cats and dogs. We have not seen a lot of exotic parasites, just the same ones we see in Canada. We did some post-mortems of laying hens yesterday that were completely obstructed with ascarids. We also found 2 cases of paraphimonus (sp?), a reportable endo parasite in bovines.

LIMA sterilization campaign: acepromazine, ketamine, atropine. All IV or IM. Lateral flank approach for the spays. Nylon (fishing line) suture material. Very similar surgical techniques to Canada, besides the flank approach (flank is faster, smaller incision and location is less likely to dehisce due to pressure from abdominal organs as with the linea alba....but don’t lose a pedicle b-c it’s hard to find again!) Sterility is minimal, but animals are given long acting antimicrobials post-surgery, along with anti-parasitics, etc. no analgesia. Subcuticular intradermal closure.

Iquitos sterilization/Australian vet: xylazine, ketamine-diazapam, atropine. All IV or IM. I know understand why zylazine is not routinely used anymore in small animal medicine, my spay had cold, grey mm´s, and took forever to wake up. The vet was reassuring, but I was pretty freaked put: P on the upside, she says they very rarely have complications with xylazine, and all spays get IV fluid to help support the CV system. Sterility is much better here, I got
to use gloves and clean instruments, and proper skin prep for the incision site. Vicryl mostly, subcuticular intradermal closure. Rabies vaccines, anti-parasitics, and nsaid´s are used. My spay was a big dog with a deep chest, and had had about a million puppies in her day. I was exhausted afterwards, but had a great teacher, which helped immensely.

VET TALK FINISHED!

We get back to Lima on Thursday, when we will start working for a marine mammal rescue organization. Their busy season starts in June so hopefully we will be able to help mobilize and rehabilitate some seals and dolphins. The vet trained in Peru and specialized in California so he has a lot to teach us!

That is all for now, hope you are all doing well.

Liz