ovariohysterectomy
Today, on October 23 2007, I did my first spay surgery on a 5 month old Beagle puppy named Mocha! She is going to be adopted by a fellow vettie student. Nic was my wingman and Jenni was the anesthetist. SO scary and awesome at the same time!!! They didn't tell us until noon what our assignments were, so when I walked into the operative practice labroom and saw my name next to "Primary" (which I really didn't expect; I actually thought Nic was going to get Primary today), I said really loud, "OH MY GOD", hahaha. I was NOT prepared (emotionally; I was prepared knowledge-wise though), so I had to stand around and relax and calm down a bit (we had to wait around for the pre-med to take effect anyway).
We started at 2 pm and ended around 4:30--- 2 and a half hours (for a surgery that usually takes a seasoned veterinarian about 20 minutes).... pretty pathetic, but hey I am learning here. :)
For those of you who don't know what this surgery is, it is basically incising into the abdomen of a female dog and removing her ovaries and uterus. Craaaaaaaaazy, right? Yes, very. And I did the procedure, and my awesome group assisting-- well, awesomely-- with everything else. Jenni had Mocha's body temp at a toasty warm 101 degrees upon finishing surgery, while other groups had their animals at 92 (you have to warm the animals post-op with rice-filled socks from the microwave and warm air-filled bearhuggers and blankies, so that they creep up to at least 98 degrees). And Nic handed me instruments and cut sutures and pointed out when a suture line accidentally touched my face mask (I have to work on not leaning in so closely-- NB: we were easily able to remove the suture line without it touching Mocha). The residents all said I did a good job so hopefully I did, haha. I am gonna get there early tomorrow and check on my little girl to make sure her incision looks okay (the clinician said they can have a lot of swelling at the surgery site so I hope I didn't do too much manipulating and stuff to cause that to happen; although there was a lot of times where the intestine just wanted to jump out of the incision and say hello. Hence, lots of pushing stuff back in.
Anyway.... yes. So I did surgery today. And I probably won't do surgery again until clinics, but still... it was good. :)
We started at 2 pm and ended around 4:30--- 2 and a half hours (for a surgery that usually takes a seasoned veterinarian about 20 minutes).... pretty pathetic, but hey I am learning here. :)
For those of you who don't know what this surgery is, it is basically incising into the abdomen of a female dog and removing her ovaries and uterus. Craaaaaaaaazy, right? Yes, very. And I did the procedure, and my awesome group assisting-- well, awesomely-- with everything else. Jenni had Mocha's body temp at a toasty warm 101 degrees upon finishing surgery, while other groups had their animals at 92 (you have to warm the animals post-op with rice-filled socks from the microwave and warm air-filled bearhuggers and blankies, so that they creep up to at least 98 degrees). And Nic handed me instruments and cut sutures and pointed out when a suture line accidentally touched my face mask (I have to work on not leaning in so closely-- NB: we were easily able to remove the suture line without it touching Mocha). The residents all said I did a good job so hopefully I did, haha. I am gonna get there early tomorrow and check on my little girl to make sure her incision looks okay (the clinician said they can have a lot of swelling at the surgery site so I hope I didn't do too much manipulating and stuff to cause that to happen; although there was a lot of times where the intestine just wanted to jump out of the incision and say hello. Hence, lots of pushing stuff back in.
Anyway.... yes. So I did surgery today. And I probably won't do surgery again until clinics, but still... it was good. :)