Category — Pets

Somebody’s cat is not coming home tonight.

He has a collar. He has a name. He has a microchip.

But there’s no address on the collar. The microchip is registered but the two phone numbers it directs us to are disconnected.

And while we could take a photo of him and put posters up around where he was found, the tragic fact that he had been hit by a car, killing him instantly and leaving his face looking like something out of a zombie movie, means that doing so would be likely to traumatize small children and nauseate adults.

Somebody’s cat isn’t coming home tonight. He’s sitting in our freezer, with a note from the poor soul that hit him, apologizing for doing so. They tried to do the right thing, at least.

So Somebody’s cat isn’t coming home tonight. Hug your cats if you know where they are, at least some of them will be home tonight. [Read more →]

Most emergencies can be prevented with care and observation. Most of the time if you do the right thing everything will sort itself out. Sometimes you go through the motions, do everything you know how to do, and still end up with an emergency on your hands.

A ‘Peek & Shriek’ surgery is a surgical case where you suspect something really bad is going on in the abdomen, you either don’t have time or don’t have the equipment to work out what it is, and decide to cut to the chase and cut the animal open on the surgery table. Often going to surgery will give you a definite diagnosis, and for some things you need surgery to fix them anyway, so it’s not as though exploratory surgery is a bad option. It’s also a very fast way to get your diagnosis.

The ‘Peek’ part refers to the opening of the abdomen because you have to clue what’s going bad. The ‘Shriek’ part refers to the copious foul language emitted from the surgeon as they discover something utterly unfixable. Like last night. [Read more →]

Some days are just bad days. Yesterday was one of them.

When I started work at 10 o’clock I walked in to be told by one of the other vets “I’ve already euthanised two things today. You’re on death-duty for the rest of the day.”  I shrugged it off, since we don’t really have duties, and I had performed a very emotional euthanasia the night before, which involved keeping the dog alive and pain free long enough for the whole family to visit and say goodbye.

Euthanasia is a large part of the veterinary profession. In human medicine the goal is to make the patient live at all costs. We have the option of letting the patient live only as long as it doesn’t suffer, and then ending their story without pain.

First consult of the day was another dog I couldn’t fix- he needed surgery, but with his many health problems the surgery was likley to kill him. Owner, full of tears, elected to take him home to say goodbye to the family and be put to sleep tomorrow. Even when the animal isn’t put to sleep then and there, it’s still an extremely emotionally charged situation.

Shortly afterwards I was told that my hospital patient, a cat who had been hit by a car but on the road to recovery was probably going to be put to sleep as the owners didn’t have time to nurse him. And just after he had just started to eat on his own!

Sometimes people secretly tell you that they want to put their dog down, they just want to know if it’s ok. They come across as very indecisive and if you mention words like ’suffering’ or ‘quality of life’ they pounce on these words and don’t let go.  Some people have made up their minds, some want permission to not feel guilty about putting their pet to sleep. [Read more →]