Flying solo

I was doing a bitch spey the other day when it got me thinking about the first time I attempted to do a bitch spey solo. The key word in that last sentence was "attempted".

It didn't start out well. I have a theory that you can always tell which way surgery is going to go based on how the prep & anaesthesia is going - aggressive dog, difficult to anaesthetise, lost surgical kits = never a good sign (yes, I also avoid black cats and walking under ladders). This surgery began with the complication of the senior surgeon being held up in a meeting just as the dog was being anaesthetised. We assumed she would be out by the time the dog was prepped but no such luck, she was still stuck discussing ways we could establish "gold standard" practice in the clinic (i.e. using the highest standards of treatment). When the nurse went in to inform the vet that the patient was ready, she was told to "keep it under" until the vet was ready...not exactly gold standard practice. She stormed into the surgery with the bang of the door and said to me (as I cowered out of her path), "Come on, you're doing the surgery!" Um, okay, totally unprepared but in I go, sink or swim.

I opened her up to find a massively enlarged spleen blocking my path. This is common in some animals under barbiturate anaesthesia, but certainly doesn't make things any easier for a new vet. All I could think was, "Don't hit the spleen, don't hit the spleen!" I slowly edged my spey hook past the spleen (as it's name suggests, it is a small hook used to pull the uterus closer to the incision) and, as I very carefully retracted it, the spleen sprang into action and IMPALED itself on the hook kamakazi-style. Arg!! Now, the spleen is essentially just a bag of blood, so when a hole is punched into it by a metal object, it tends to react by bleeding...copiously...and when further holes are made in an attempt to close the first hole it just bleeds MORE (no I did not even attempt to stitch it). I stuck a swab onto the hole and, to my credit, calmly called for the nurse.
"Um, I seem to have impaled the spleen."
"What?"
"The spleen," I pointed with my eyes as both hands were involved in blood stoppage, "it has a hole where a hole shouldn't be. Help?"
So then she had to interrupt the meeting a second time to tell the senior vet that she was needed in surgery as the new grad had impaled the spleen and the dog was bleeding.

And I still hadn't found the uterus...

Post-script: We stuck some clotting gel to the spleen and the dog was fine...minus her uterus.