My First Spay

While in veterinary school you have a community practice rotation to practice “real life” medicine. During this rotation is when we learned to do spays and neuters. Most of the dogs and cats are humane society animals that were getting adopted. In fact, many of us adopted these pets ourselves. My parents adopted the dog that was my first neuter.

To spay a dog or cat you enter the abdomen and pull up the ovaries through a small incision making sure not to tear the vessels that feed it. After you ligate (place a suture around the vessel to keep it from bleeding it) you transfix (cut the tissue) the ovarian pedicle, you drop it back into the dark cavernous abyss of the abdomen. You then ligate the uterus that has two very large vessels on either side of it. The uterus then gets transfixed and the stump is placed back into the abdomen.

When you are learning to do this, you are also learning how to handle tissue. Tissue that is usually covered in fat, aka grease, and wants to shred to tiny pieces. It usually resembles hamburger meat when you are finished. To add to the stress, the older the animal, the more the tissue falls apart when handled.

The surgery suite is a long room with multiple surgical tables lined up in succession. There is a single clinician that goes from one surgical table to the next to help the students. This clinician uses a laser to point to the tissue and direct you on how to proceed. Now, mind you, we are all new at handling tissue, so it all turns to hamburger meat, and the laser light is red. You can imagine the difficulty of seeing where she is pointing it.

So here I am, a fourth year veterinary student, doing my first spay on a middle aged labrador. The dog is owned by a veterinarian that has a government job and her young son. The entire time I am spaying this dog I am thinking about her boy that is at home waiting for her. Over my shoulder is the clinician with laser light pointing at where to clamp and where to ligate but in reality just getting frustrated with me because I can’t see the light. Meanwhile, I’m in my head running through every possible horrible scenario and thinking about the boy. My heart is racing, my hands are sweating, and I am wondering what am I doing here.

The spay seemed like it took forever but in reality went smoothly. My patient woke up and had a great recovery. When they came to pick her up that afternoon, after going over all the after care instructions, the boy handed me a single pink rose. This is why I am becoming a veterinarian.