Cat Castrate

Today marked my return to small animal surgery. It went poorly.

Thomas probably had no idea what his owners planned when they stuck him in a basket this morning. A young healthy male cat, he had no reason to be concerned.

He arrived at the vet surgery - probably not the best way to spend the day, but how bad could it get?

Little did he know he was about to be handed to....the vet student.

It all went well to begin with. He was examined (again) and weighed, then stuck with some magic sleepy drugs. Ketamine! Woo!

After a bit of preparation the nasty vet student dived in. He had performed this operation quite a few times and was fairly confident, except this time it wasn't to go quite a smoothly. Thomas wasn't built like other cats and the normal anatomy didn't quite appear as it should.

Some swearing later the nasty vet student gave up trying to figure out what was going on and asked for help. He placed a ligature on an offending blood vessel and snipped.

The ligature slipped.

The vet student's blood pressure spiked and the swearing returned. Luckily for Thomas so did the hero of this tale, our vet, who placed another, better ligature. This stopped the bleeding and made Thomas much more comfortable.

The nasty vet student has learned from this day. The most important thing is to never take anything for granted, even the anatomy we have learned from day 1.

But the most difficult lesson is that these things happen, and will probably happen again, even with the most simple of operations.

Thomas survived almost intact, with the lack of testicles as his only lasting mark.