On a day when it didn’t seem apparent how we would accomplish what needed to be done, most of it got done. We could have spent a great deal of the time in despair of one degree or another and wasted a perfectly fine day.  I don’t think we did.

Dr. Julia is a mobile equine vet but had to work all day in a small animal clinic where she picks up some extra work – her second job. It left her with very little time to work out details of getting her vet box transferred from one truck to the other.  My job for the morning was to lighten the weight of the box by taking out all that was in it.

You have no idea how much stuff can be packed into a box the size of a small truck bed.  And since much of the medical supplies are put in hastily, on the way to or from an emergency, there is a lot of disorganization and a bit of trash that never gets disposed of.  Since most of the patients live outside and eat hay there is a generous complement of oak leaves and hay stubble scattered throughout. It’s a mobile hospital and it could probably use a full-time janitor to keep track of it’s condition.

The box when it was new carried it’s own supply of water, with a little pump.  That no longer works but the water tanks were full and water is heavy.  I had to  revisit my siphoning skills with one of the docs treatment tubes (trying not to think about which orifice of a horse the tube might have visited last…).  I am a very effective siphoner.

Everything I took out was piled on a table in the yard, covered by a tarp.  The rest of the day I spent cleaning the box, and vacuuming the old vet truck.  The doctor has a beautiful, intelligent, loving black dog (Tess) who spends a lot of time in that truck and I vacuumed enough black hair out of it to cover another dog just like her..

During lunch break Julie came home and we spent some time unbolting the box from the pick-up bed. There were only three bolts, but that kind of job has some dirty, under the truck moments. We had trouble with one of the bolts.  It was unmovable.  I kept praying that a man with a tool would come walking down the driveway, but that didn’t happen.

Julie’s guess is that the box weighs almost 800 lbs. and when she bought it, it took four men to hoist it into her truck. She asked various friends if they could help her with this move but couldn’t manage to get four men in one place at the same time.  The crew we ended up with was one hefty older teen boy, one short Hispanic man and his three young children, and once more it was after dark.

Fortunately our one man was pretty resourceful.  He had us slide the box out and put one end on the ground, holding it at a tilt.  I pulled the truck away, Julie backed the other truck in it’s place and they rested the box in the bed, lifted the end off the ground and slid it in.  Two guys did this.  It was beautiful.  This may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but when you’ve had a day, a week, a year, when everything you try to do is hard, it is a big deal.  This has been Julie’s life for a while now.  So I gave the man a hug.  He deserved it.

Today the supplies got put back in and the doc is ready to go on Monday, almost. She still has to buy a step stool because the truck is so high she can’t reach into the side compartments of the vet box… there’s always something. Just sayin’.