Project Update!

Last Saturday I got the incredible opportunity to volunteer at an animal hospital near my house called Family Dog & Cat Hospital. They actually had to preform an emergency surgery on a one year old Bulldog named Whiskey. Whiskey came in with a swollen shoulder that had been getting progressively worse for the past three months. Dr. Garcia thought it was a foreign body embedded in his shoulder and thought it mandatory to go into surgery given that Whiskey's temperature was rather high.
The staff got Whiskey all prepped for surgery and allowed me to insert his catheter for IV fluids and anesthesia. Dr. Garcia even let me make the first cut!! It was only a couple inches, but still pretty awesome none the less.
Once we got Whiskey's shoulder open, we discovered that there was no foreign body in his shoulder. There was just a huge mass of inflamed fat and dead tissue. Dr. Garcia ended up making an incision site that was 10 inches long and 6 inches wide. That's how far out the inflammation had spread. Dr. Garcia removed all the of inflamed fat and dead tissue and set some aside to preform a culture on it.
The surgery itself lasted an hour and a half plus another half an hour to close up the incision site and set a tube in place for draining. Dr. Garcia's diagnoses for Whiskey ended up being chronic inflammation in the right shoulder. That was the most generic way of describing what was going on without being able to conduct further research.


These are pictures of Whiskey while he was being prepped for his surgery.

The tubes you see on the right hand side are the breathing tubes that Whiskey was hooked up to during the surgery. The yellow box on the table next to him monitored his blood oxygen levels and heart rate. The blood oxygen level had to stay above 94 or else he wouldn't be getting enough oxygen to support him. If that happened, the veterinarian technician would have to manually pump on air bag attached to the breathing machine to get the blood oxygen level back to a safe number.

This picture gives you a better view of the inflammation on Whiskey's right shoulder. That little red bump is where blood was actually dripping out when he came into the clinic. The incision site was originally going to be limited to the area around the bump, but ended up spreading to his entire shoulder and part of his stomach. It basically covered the whole shaved area.