I was on surgery again today. I don't know why, but I always seem to end up with the difficult surgery days. Five were scheduled: 4 dentals and a spay. Now, surgery appointments are supposed to drop off between 7 and 7:30 in the morning so we have plenty of time to run bloodwork and the doctor can do her exam and call the owners with any questions or concerns. Three of them showed up by 7:45; the other two didn't come in until after 8:30. The owner of these 2 pets told me, "I'm in a hurry, I really need to get going." Which really makes me want to question him as to why he decided to show up an hour late. --Frustration number 1.
Frustration number 2 begins with the scheduled spay. To start off, this dog was a 7 month old, 70 pound lab puppy. What's wrong with this picture?? a) Dogs and cats should be spayed or neutered by 6 months at the absolute latest. This is when they reach sexual maturity, and several complications can occur. For instance, if this dog we spayed today had been in heat, not only does that mean an additional charge of $65 for the owner, but a lot of extra bleeding in the abdomen, which can and will extend the time of the surgery. b) Performing abdominal surgery on a 70 pound puppy is not an ideal situation for many reasons. The larger the animal, the longer it takes for the incision to heal, allowing for opportunities for infection to occur. Also, the fact that this is a lab puppy (and a very untrained one at that), it will be very difficult to keep her from jumping and running around, tearing the incision open, thus allowing for even more opportunities for infection to occur. Infection means extensively longer healing time, pain and discomfort for the dog, being on antibiotics for several weeks, and more money spent by the client.
Part B of Frustration number 2: I mentioned earlier that this puppy is very untrained. I'm saying, like as untrained as a dog can be. First of all, as I was talking to the owner about what to expect for the surgery, the dog isn't sitting nicely beside him. Of course not, why would she? Instead, she is jumping up on me, thrusting her whole 70 pounds and long nails on top of me repeatedly while her owner just sits there and laughs. It's not funny. I wanted to tell him to get his dog off of me, and make her sit like she actually has some manners. Also, this dog hates going in kennels. It's not exactly easy to force a 70 pound dog into a kennel. Needless to say, I got my workout early in the day. To top it all off, these people have her littermate, an intact male dog, running loose in the house with her. They are so oblivious that they think just because their dogs are brother and sister, they won't make puppies. I mean seriously, do they know NOTHING about dogs?!?! It pains me to think about it. So we were worried that we might find little tiny puppies when performing the spay. Fortunately, though, we did not. Even so, the spay took almost 2 hours.
Frustration number 3: After our surgeries were finished, I was helping out everybody else around the clinic. One dog came in for a nail trim. I was thinking, this is gonna be quick and easy. Little did I know the dog had something different in mind. I was trimming the nails, and I quicked one of them. (For those of you who don't know, there's this thing called the quick inside of dog and cat nails. It's basically the blood supply. To quick a nail means to cut the part and make them bleed.) So I got some quickstop (powder to stop the bleeding), put it on the nail, and continued trimming. A couple minutes later, I noticed the nail was still bleeding. This dog was really worked up, so she probably had high blood pressure at the moment. I put more quickstop on it and finished the nail trim. When I was done, the nail was STILL bleeding. So what did I do?? That's right, I grabbed more quickstop. This time, I held it on the nail for a good 2 minutes before walking the dog back to its owner. No more bleeding, but by this point, half of the treatment room looked like a crime scene, as did my scrub pants.
4th and final frustration of the day: We were so busy, I offered to stay past my scheduled shift and help people finish up things they needed to get done. I didn't mind, but I ended up staying until almost 7:30 after arriving at work at 6:30 this morning.
So that's my day in a little more than a nutshell. Hopefully my future posts won't have as much venting in them. Also, I discovered this today and it made me laugh:
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