Surgery (for dog) went well and all is good

It was a nerve-wracking day yesterday even though the docs tried to put my mind at ease as much as possible. I am a nervous person just generally speaking and that is why I took a drastic pay cut many years ago to move to various careers that have virtually zero stress in them. I am just not a nice person when I am stressed and was fortunate enough to have the skillsets necessary to be able to choose a bit as far as what I do for a living.

But when I do have something that makes me nervous it is always the same way. I have to take sleeping pills to accomplish slumber the night before, I can't really get anything done the day of, I turn up much earlier than I need to for my appointment, and then in the case of a dog getting surgery, I fight with all my power to not bother them endlessly all day long about updates as to how she is doing - as if my meddling is going to help anything or speed anything along.

Thankfully, everything went well. In fact, it went a lot better than anyone had anticipated.

_{here we are back in the condo after the fact, I put one of her pillows back on the sofa for a while so she can sit next to me}

When I first got there, Dr. Cynthia gave me a consultation about potential risks, the procedures they are going to use, and the potential for medication after the fact. She told me that they don't know until they get in there how many teeth they have to remove but it could be up to 12. My response was "does Nadi have 12 teeth?"

She also explained to me, and is likely legally obligated to explain to me, the very remote but very real chance that a dog can die unexpectedly during anesthesia process. It is 1-2% for dogs that are in her category of being already older than the average age and also having compromised internal organs. Nadi's liver and gall bladder are on life-support of sorts so this was the concern.

I left there very nervous and had a difficult time getting through my day. I was told that she would go into surgery at 10:30 and they would be finished by 12, they expected her to be awake at 1 and running around like normal by 2. When they hadn't contacted me and it was nearly 3pm I started to lose my damn mind. I was about to Karen them and ask for an update by phone but just as I was thinking of doing that I got a message with a wonderful update.

She was fine, wandering around, and exploring the rooms and sniffing everything, and was kind of excited and friendly towards anyone that came to see her. They were going to try to give her some wet food soon and that I can come and pick her up at 5pm.

I of course was there at 4:40.

Dr. Cynthia explained to me that the situations wasn't as dire as they had thought it would be and that they only needed to remove 4 of her teeth, not the original 8-12. She told me the teeth were extremely rotten and it wasn't actually difficult to remove them as they were very loose as well.

I'm not going to force my dog's mouth open but you can see where two of the rotten front ones have been taken out.

So now she only has 2 of her 4 front teeth on top and only 3 of the 4 on the bottom. This is fine by me because I halfway expected her to not have any of them anymore. She also had the two molars in the back on both sides on the top removed. They asked me if I wanted to keep the teeth and I said yes even though that is kind of weird and I don't know what I am going to do with that. They are cleaning them and I can pick them up today. This is a strange keepsake but I guess it will be interesting to have a look at how long the roots are on K9 teeth.

She has a few more baskets of pills and even a syringe of some liquid I have to squirt in her mouth (she's gonna love that) and she also still has to take her 3 liver and gall bladder pills. I'm lucky she really likes the chicken that I wrap these pills in because this is a lot of pills for a dog to take in a day.

She was active as ever when I picked her up that day and while a bit sluggish for the remainder of the evening, I wouldn't say that she was behaving any different than she normally would. It's like nothing ever happened.

The vet told me that she basically attacked a bowl of food they gave her and this is understandable since prior to the surgery she had to skip dinner the night before and also didn't get breakfast: That was probably the worst part of the whole experience in her world.

The rest of her teeth got cleaned while we were there as well and so the teeth she has left are whiter than they probably have ever been in the past 10 years.

This is the total bill and that is almost $250. I don't know what veterinarian services cost in your country but from what I remember from living in the USA more than 20 years ago, this is very cheap. I once had a dog bite that was cleaned up from a fight my college dog got into and it was an ER sort of situation and it was nearly this amount even without the anesthesia or a surgeon. So I think I am correct in stating that veterinarian care is a pretty fair price over here. I think it is cute that they even put the nail clipping on the list because $5 seems a bit silly on a bill.

So I am a happy boy now and maybe I am just a pessimist. I was expecting it to be a lot more expensive and a lot more difficult than it ended up being. Perhaps I should keep that in mind for when we go back because since Nadi turns 13 in just a few months, this definitely isn't our last trip to go to see those guys.