The blood kept welling up, and my heart rate was climbing with it. My fingers felt numb, awkward, fumbling around ineffectively. I was in the middle of a spey, a big dog, fat, not an easy one… About 5 minutes before, the ligature I had placed on the stump from the right ovary had slipped off as I had gently let go of it. Blood started flowing out as I saw it slide away into the depths of the abdomen, and I had been guddling about ineffectively ever since, not really knowing what to do to find the damn thing. I had an icy, sinking feeling, because i knew that the dog would bleed out, if I didn\’t fix this!
\”How\’s she looking?\” I asked the nurse, my voice tense.
\”A little bit pale, but not too bad,\” She replied.
It was a locum job, and my boss was out the back in her office. I needed help, and at the same time I knew she wasn\’t going to be pleased to have to help me. She was a lovely lady, but not when it came to coaching inexperienced vets, she\’d warned me of that.
I heaved a big sigh… \”Better give the boss a yell, I need some help here,\” I said to the nurse.
She scuttled off while I kept fishing around ineffectively in the dog\’s abdomen, sopping up blood with a wad of swabs. The nurse came back with the bad news that the boss had just said for me to get on with it. I gritted my teeth, laid out some damp swabs on the surgical drapes, gently pulled out about three miles of glistening intestines and laid them beside the surgical wound. I feverishly searched and searched, to no avail. The dog got a little paler, and I got a lot more desperate. The nurse looked more worried.
\”Better go and ask her again,\” I said. \”I\’m really not getting anywhere here!\”
She took off like a frightened rabbit. About 30 seconds later the frustrated thundercloud of my boss swept in, pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, reached in, found the bloody (literally) stump, pulled it out, ligated it, pulled her gloves off, and swept out again, leaving me feeling about two inches tall. I finished the op off without any more dramas, and heaved a huge sigh of relief when I\’d placed the last suture, and the dog had finally woken up from the anaesthetic.
I wandered into the office, feeling pale and shaky.
\”I warned you I was crap at teaching new graduates and inexperienced vets,\” My boss told me, as kindly as she could (she really was a pretty good person, she took time to involve me in her social circle, and I liked her company) – \”I just can\’t do it, I don\’t know why. Maybe don\’t tear the wing of fatty tissue that extends along the uterus before you ligate, like you have been. Then if you do have a problem, it\’s easy to pick it up again.\”
\”Ok,\” I replied, and set to writing the case up. I felt completely shattered, the cocky young vet that I was crushed in the jaws of surgical defeat, humiliated by my failure.