Day 9

0905: Arrive at vet school. No RM. People with offices in that corridor now recognise me and greet me as they come in.

0930: Give up waiting for RM, and go to the PM room to ask the technician if there are any pigs in for me yet. Nothing there, so I go to the computer room to print off some results sheets.

1000: RM arrives. There was nothing up at the farm today, so I have nothing to do until 11am. We briefly talk about farm economics, then I go to the PM room. The chief lecturer says he will phone me when the otter person arrives for the day. Off to the library.

1100: Some of the urea tubes have come back positive. Or rather, not-negative. The next stage in Salmonella isolation is to innoculate some urea broth into TSI agar. If this agar goes black, then we have Salmonella. Maybe. So I stick loopfuls of broth into the new agar and stick it in the incubator overnight.

1900: After about 20 minutes in the lab, Pathology phoned and told me to come down. I'd finished in the lab for the day, so I went down and we necropsied otters for the rest of the day. We had an interesting case - one otter appeared to have a healed diaphragmatic hernia, as if it had been hit by a car before, and then healed with half the liver in its chest instead of its abdomen. We'll never know, of course, because we could hardly ask the otter! But interesting all the same!

I've also discovered that if you hit an animal with enough force, say, with a car doing 70mph, then the tissue disintegrates. And then there's absolutely no chance of finding any recognisable tissue at all, no matter how good at pathology you are!