Dog vs Computer Surgery

I was fixing my computer recently and noticed quite a few similarities between that and a splenectomy I assisted on when seeing practice. First I'll go through the splenectomy, then the diagnosis and removal of a dodgy hard drive.

Splenectomy
As with all patients a thorough clinical exam and history was taken before the operation and the dog, Ben, was deemed well enough to undergo the operation. He was given fluids and taken through to the operating theatre.

Here we knocked him out, intubated him so he could breathe, and he was prepared for the surgery whilst we scrubbed up and put on sterile gloves to reduce the risk of infection. The vet made the incision through the skin, muscles and peritoneum in to the abdomen, exposing the enlarged spleen. Now came the fiddly bit - tying off all the blood vessels to the organ so when it was removed a lot of blood wouldn't follow. I was clamping and helping with the exposure whilst the vet tied off the vessels and cut. It wasn't long before the spleen was ready to be removed and was taken away in a kidney dish.

After a check to make sure there were no bleeding vessels we arrived at the longest part of the operation, closing the animal. Here you have to be very careful to make sure the wound closes properly or you may produce a herniation site post-op. Worst case is the sutures don't hold and the animal is found with its intestines hanging out. Not very pleasant, thus you take your time.

Hard Drive Removal
With very little pre-op care necessary for my computer (called Tigers) except backing up my important files I started quickly with the anaesthesia. The last thing I wanted was it to wake up when I was in the middle of the operation, so I removed the power cord and discharged the power supply.

Being all on my own I had to prepare the patient as well as myself. I vacuumed all the dust off the cover and went to work getting rid of my static by earthing myself on the nearest radiator. A quick bit of action with the screwdriver and I was in to the case, exposing the hard drive as I worked my way down. Now for the fiddly bit - extracting the power supply to the drive. Cutting any wires here is bad, as is pulling the wrong thing, but the power socket was hidden deep inside behind the graphics card. After safely isolating the drive from both power and data connections I made sure the wires weren't going to hit anything important when turned back on and removed the drive.

Finally the longest part of this operation - closing the case. I'm not sure why, but this always takes ages. I checked for wires in fans, stuck behind RAM chips and various other places they go to cause chaos and managed to screw the case back together.



I'm happy to report both patients are still functional and survived the ordeal. Anyone else see the similarities or am I just crazy?