Diary of a Third-Year Vet Student: Kitty!

I completed my first cat spay yesterday. It was a long, grueling afternoon. The surgery is difficult--the tissues are tiny and delicate (our cat was at most 8 months old), and it was the first time most of us had ever opened up an abdomen, so the cutting and the closure procedures were much more complicated than what is required for a dog neuter. But unlike my first surgery, I didn't stumble out of the building afterwords wondering what the heck just happened. I felt like I owned this surgery. What made it so much more powerful was going in this morning at 6am to check on kitty and seeing that her incision was not red or bruised or oozing, watching her gobble the jar of chicken baby food and a good third of a can of the wet food that Beast eats, both of which I brought in from home, and having her purr and knead her paws so much that I could hardly conduct her physical exam. Even cleaning up urine-soaked pellets from her litter box made me happy--it meant that I didn't damage her delicate ureters which are located quite close to her uterus. Or what's left of her uterus. I took most of that out along with her ovaries.  

It wasn't perfect. We are still learning, and mistakes are inevitable. The key is to catch them, get help, and correct them right away. 

The surgeries take far longer than they would in a clinical setting. This means that your teammate who has anesthesiology duties for that surgery has a really important job: keeping the patient alive. But as hectic as this surgery was, my teammate managed to snap some pictures of me and my assistant, and I'm really grateful to her for that. 

I've written quite a few more paragraphs for this post then deleted them. What we vet students are doing is not a secret, but as we advance in the program, I'm finding few laypeople are as into the details as we are. I'm finding that the details can be distressing to some people. With the current anti-science and anti-fact climate in our country, descriptions of how doctors and veterinarians learn and perform our trade can be twisted and turned around to suggest that we are being immoral or cruel or used to support arguments that we are not to be trusted. I don't want the blog to become a source for that kind of misinformation. So I will leave the details of the surgery for another day.