Dorothy Under The Knife

On Thursday, Dorothy had her spaying surgery.  Her milkshake will no longer bring the boys to the yard.  She will not have any unwanted gentlemen callers showing up at strange hours tracking pheromones.  She can now no longer be a bio-mom.  And to all this we say:  yay!

Or we will in a few days hence.

The worst part of the whole ordeal so far has really been denying her breakfast on Thursday morning.  She could have water then, but nothing else, and Dorothy is definitely the kind of gal who believes in starting her day with a square meal.  When I fed the cats and didn't feed her third, as is our wont, she cried a bit.  And then sat in her crate and cried a bit.  And then snake-crawled into her bed and lay there all despondent and oh woe is me.  It was very hard not to just scramble her an egg and slip her a slice of buttered toast.

Then, because I had no treats in my pocket to give her, did I think she would actually walk all the way to the vet?  I had hoped she would, but No.  No treats, no trotting.  So carry her to the vet I did.

We picked her up at 4:30 all groggy and pathetic-looking and wearing the cone of shame. She was barely out of the anesthesia at that point, so once we got her home, she just lay down and shivered and cried at the cone encircling her neck.  She walked like a drunken sailor, and she kept somehow suction-cupping the cone to the walls as she stumbled down the hall.  So sad!

I ended up taking her cone off at night and she didn't once try to even look at her stitch area, let alone bother the wound (and she still hasn't, three days later).  She's been on painkillers every morning, but in the afternoons when they wear off she has been her old self:  running and jumping and doing everything she is not supposed to want to do.

She even has forgiven the cone of shame.  Here she is thinking it a fine chew toy:

The only negative, so far, has been that she seems to have acquired a UTI, which meant that starting Saturday afternoon she asked to go outside pretty much every ten or fifteen minutes.  Of course, it didn't really occur to me what was going on until about 4:55 on Saturday, which is basically the beginning of the Vet Dead Zone.  I lunged for the phone in slow motion -- NOOOOOOOOO! -- and made the call, but it was too late.  The office had closed and would not re-open until Monday morning.  (A vet who opened up a Sunday walk-in clinic could make a fortune, I'm convinced, since all my pets get their ailments on that day).  But after the eightieth time of taking Dorothy out at 10-minute intervals, I was grumpy enough to call the vet's emergency line, and now I'm to give Dorothy vitamin C today to make her urine acidic, and then if it is still going on tomorrow I can pick up antibiotics.

Despite her making it through this one with flying colors, Dorothy and I are both very hopeful that this will be her first and last surgery.