That Squirrel.

      Remember that spinal Injury squirrel that I was talking about in my Lost and Found blog post? Well, he's a little shit. His daily cleaning and feeding chart reports that he has gotten out almost every day and on a few days someone has just written "insane."
      So I found a good method for cleaning his cage where I catch him in a net first and then clean his cage. this worked perfectly the first day I tried it and I was way too proud of myself. I had let four other squirrels out that day, but I had caught them all within 10 minutes of them escaping, and it wasn't that spinal injury squirrel so according to everyone else I had accomplished something. Goals.
      My victory over the insane squirrel, however, was short lived as the next day when I was putting the squirrel back, his foot got stuck in the net. As I reached in with a leather-gloved hand, he immediately clung to my hand and started biting harder than any other animal who'd bitten me. Honestly, I think his life-force is fueled by spite. He moved up my arm and bit where the glove stopped, then with his foot still stuck jumped out of the cage to my other hand that just had a latex glove and bit that too. I shoved him and the net back in the cage and ran to our bathroom and scrubbed my hands with soap, then iodine, then soap again and used a crap ton of band-aids to cover it all up because you do not want exposed flesh wounds in an animal clinic. I was just fine until someone started fussing over me and asking if I was okay and then my brain went shit I need to panic and I cried a bit. I did some more work, then filled out an incident report and was told by my supervisor's supervisor to take the rest of the day off and to get a tetanus shot.
       The first walk-in clinic I went to laughed at me and the nurse at the front desk told me, "We can't just give you a tetanus shot." as if it was the holy grail she continued, "You have to have all these forms and authorization to treat and workers comp..." and she looked at me very definitively like I needed to leave and as I did so they laughed at me even more and that's when I went and cried in my car while texting my supervisor. She informed me that as an unpaid intern that I counted as a volunteer and did not qualify for workers comp, instead, they were just going to pay the co-pay of whatever the insurance didn't cover.
       I then drove to a different clinic that had much more friendly and willing to help staff and the whole place looked brighter too. The nurse and doctor all laughed with me at my crazy squirrel story and it was a great experience.

       I still love working at the clinic and couldn't ask for better co-interns and nicer supervisors, I still want to look into going into zoology. I'm not mad at the squirrel or anything, he was just being a squirrel.....and all of this was still better than waiting tables and dealing with people.