Animal Aid: more surgery stories

The other day at Animal Aid was a very long day...at one point, I was in the surgery building (as usual, lately) and the ambulance came back from it's first run. A current hospital patient had just been brought in to have a rectal prolapse fixed, which required anesthesia and a certain amount of orchestration. Then when the ambulance showed up, we got 2 new puppies that were very sick. One kept having seizures, and was mostly unresponsive...one was simply unconscious.

We have no idea what had happened to them...the life of a street dog here is fraught with all kinds of danger, and because none of the dogs have "owners", we hardly ever get any kind of history on them. You are walking into these situations blind, trying to help them. THEN another puppy was brought in, this one was having trouble breathing, and was gasping for air.

The doctor was at lunch, the doctors assistant helped with the prolapse but then went to lunch, and I was left standing in the surgery prep room alone with 4 dying puppies. I got them all hooked up to IV drips, and they were monitored until the doctor came back (THAT felt like forever!) (3 of them are in the photo above, on the floor, with a couple of the guys I called in to help me manage their IV's.)

Right after the lunch emergency rush, we had a dog scheduled for a leg amputation. He had been brought to surgery prep earlier in the morning, because he was severely dehydrated, had a gaping hole in his neck full of maggots, and was very sick. I wanted him on fluids as long as possible before his surgery happened. So, in reality, I had 5 dogs in the room with me...luckily the adult dog was very quiet on the floor while he got his IV drip.

One by one, we dealt with the emergencies, started surgery, and the day went on. In the end it was an 11 hour day, non stop. The only thing I had to eat all day (between IV monitoring) was a small bag of potato chips. And I loved every minute of it. :)

The leg amputation went well, and all we could hope for now was that the dog would get better. Sadly, the dog ended up dying a day later.