Our Spring Break Vet Hospital Play Date went very well, if I do say so myself.  Did the kids play for hours?  No!  The only thing 4 year olds do for any reasonable duration is play in the mud.  Did they quietly focus and get completely absorbed in the process for about 30 minutes?  Yes.  And THAT my friends, is a rare and worthwhile experience.  If you’d like to learn how to build a Vet Hospital in one night in your own home, click “read more”…

You’ll need a waiting room and some willing patients.  I was asked more than once if I was using live animals.  You people really DO think I’m nuts, don’t you?

A large, useless triage nurse tied to a small chair is great for decoration, but not mandatory.  She’ll probably make the heart attack wait and send the small laceration to surgery immediately.  I’m joking. I worked triage a few times in the ER, and it SUCKED.  It’s quite difficult to determine how sick someone MIGHT be when they’ve walked through the doors of the ER.  Small cut, major head wound…everyone is FREAKED the HECK OUT in the ER.

It’s helpful if the patients have charts, maybe with primary and secondary complaints.  As you can see, Mickey can’t giggle and we’re going to rule out a broken funny bone.  The Xray pictured is actually the hind leg of a dog post plate insertion, but WHATEVER FOLKS!!  It’s a PRETEND Vet Hospital…keep this in mind as you are Google’ing animal skeletons and Xrays.

Yep, diagrams of unicorn skeletons are available on the fantastic Information Superhighway.  Sara not only read the chart correctly, but she casted the correct broken humerus.  Excellent work Dr. S!

Xrays of Elmo are very easy to find.  His eyes looked so creepy in the scan that I made him blind.  He complained of bumping into other monsters and having an irritating laugh.  So true Mr. E…so true.

Dr. B (all Vet Doc identities are confidential in my Vet Hospital…they’d simply be overrun with business if I let out who they were) placed his dog’s Xray on the viewer and found that his dog’s complaint of “lost keys” might have a traceable etiology.  He threw on a surgical mask and rushed him into surgery here:

The surgery was a success.  Dr. B spent considerable time charting the meds administered post-surgery.  His spelling is to be commended.  Sara wrote a prescription for “Tolodol”, which wow’ed all of us familiar with meds.  She was eerily close to a real med name and her ad-hoc spelling included vowels for the first time ever.  Thanks to Drs. K and M for supplying a “prescription pad”.  Total FUN.

Xray viewing machines are expensive and time consuming (not too mention “obsolete” in the real world).  You’ll need an empty diaper box, a flashlight, some tape, some paper, a Sharpie, and a paper clip.  Daunting, yes?  There’s 3 minutes well spent.

My viewer may be obsolete technology, but I invented a machine that could convert between MRIs, CT Scans, and Xrays, all at the push of a button.  Again, you’ll need a Huggies box, some paper, tape, a Sharpie, and a flashlight.  Use a lot of tape.  This scanner saw some serious action.

You might remember these pennant banners from last summer’s Monkey Rainforest Birthday Party.  Add a fabric marker and some stencils, and you’ll have a large banner that reads “Vet Hospital” that can stretch across an entire basement entry way.

I hope the kids had fun, because I sure did.  Mommies played a very interactive role in helping the kids read the charts and design interventions.  Our day had an interesting start as every Vet claimed their initial patients had jelly bean constipation.  Dr. B proceeded to surgery, but Dr. K took a more conservative route.  She donned gloves and invented a new massage technique that Greg quietly dubbed, “Literally Squeezing The Shit Out”.  It worked and her Bunny Rabbit avoided admittance.  Kelly’s Polar Bear did not.  By the end of the day she had a serious list of maladies: broken arm, gastric reflux, constipation….Kelly worked on her all morning, but eventually, she had to be admitted for further observation.

As always, thanks for sharing this journey with me.  I may be tired, but I am never, ever, EVER bored.  Godspeed to all my little Vets!