How to take out a drain

Well, yesterday I went to work, and nothing really happened. It was 99 degrees outside, so I figured that it'd be either really slow or really busy, with many emergencies. It was the former, and so we were bored. A couple more days now it is supposed to be temperatures in the triple-digits, so I bet they will get LOTS of heatstroke and burn victims while I'm not there!

Drain. I learned something. First off, I'll explain what a drain is. It's a rubber piece of tubing, somewhat like a the balloon for balloon-animal-making. When they drain an abscess or whatever (which was the case in this bulldog, directly below his ear), they sew a drain in so that the tubing is poking out of the skin on both sides. The rest of the "stuff" (AKA blood and pus) that's inside the abscess as leftovers will drain out around the tube, and infection isn't able to go in. It's clever! So, I learned that when you take it out (which in this case was 1 week after it being put in), you pull slightly on one end of the tube, cut it as close to the skin as possible, and then you pull from the other end to get the tube out. This is so that none of the dry crusty parts of the tube, which were on the outside of the body, go back into the wound and contaminate it. Smart, eh!