Smoothie madness!

So this is one of those "kind of but not really related to vet school" posts.

Knowing that my hours were going to be crazy in clinics, I decided to invest in some supplements that could be added to a smoothie so that I could have a liquid breakfast or lunch on days when things were too busy for me to eat.

First off, I went and bought a smoothie-specific blender. Reading through reviews, a lot of them about the choice I wound up going with were negative and mentioned leaking. But I liked the design so much, I bought it anyway. I went with the Oster My Blend, which is basically a giant Magic Bullet. I haven't had any leaks, and it tackles whole, frozen strawberries and big chunks of frozen pineapple like a champ. Basically, it's cheap, and it works really well, and it's kind of cute.

Next I went in search of powdered supplements. On a recommendation from a friend, I wound up going with Amazing Grass products. I bought their chocolate Green Superfood supplement to put in my breakfast smoothies. It's not really a protein powder, but it's packed with veggies (broccoli, spinach, wheat grass). I just add a half cup of plain Greek yogurt to up the protein level. For lunch I bought the vanilla chai flavored Amazing Meal powder. This is more of a whole meal substitute similar to Slim Fast, but also has the super veggie mix in it. If I had it to do over again, I'd get the chocolate flavor of this as well, because the vanilla is a little too sweet for me.

Anyway, I just wanted to share. On the clinics side of things, I started my first night of small animal ER last night. It was not a fun night. We had one euthanasia that the owners weren't expecting (the referring vet diagnosed pneumonia, but the dog had vertical nystagmus so... definitely not).  And another crashing dog that had no PLRs and went into respiratory and cardiac arrest while we were trying to place a catheter. His glucose was so low it wouldn't even register on the glucometer (which means it's less than 20). We performed CPR on him for awhile, because the owner asked us to try and get him back, but after 15 minutes and no response to epinephrine or anything we were trying to do the owner gave us permission to let him go. It was kind of a heart-breaking night, actually.