Dog Surgery–Guest Post from Diane_in_MN
Last September, I scheduled Teddy for a preventive gastropexy.
Great Danes are poster dogs for bloat—when the stomach fills with air that can’t escape– and torsion—when the stomach twists, cutting off circulation, damaging other organs, and resulting in shock and death. This is an immediately life-threatening condition, and more often than not requires emergency surgery, which is not guaranteed to be successful. A gastropexy, or stomach tack, secures the stomach to the abdominal wall. It doesn’t prevent bloat, but does prevent torsion, making the condition less likely to be fatal and much easier to treat.* And this is a comforting thought, especially if one is away from home (and from one’s own vet and emergency clinic) with one’s dog.
Gastropexies can be done laparascopically, and in fact Tasha’s was done that way a few years ago at the University of Minnesota’s vet clinic. The advantage of this method is that it replaces a ten-inch incision on the abdomen with a two-inch incision on the flank, which was a big plus with a rowdy girl like Tasha. But Teddy, although he has his moments, is in general a quieter dog, and he would have been much more stressed than the Alpha Bitch by spending two days at the University. One of my vets also works at our local emergency clinic and so is very familiar with the procedure—she agreed that it would be a treat for her to perform a gastropexy on a healthy dog—and I knew that she’d let me bring him home as soon as he came out of anesthesia if everything looked good. So we set the date.
Preparing the average dog for surgery doesn’t take much time or effort: some basic blood tests to make sure that all systems are fine and an empty stomach are generally all it takes. Teddy’s pre-surgery prep would be done on the morning of the operation. Preparing to bring the dog home can be another story. The average dog does not necessarily cooperate with post-surgical instructions like “Leave stitches in for fourteen days.” This is why most people who’ve spent any time in veterinary offices are familiar with the Elizabethan (or E-) collar, the hard plastic cone that keeps the critter wearing it from chewing on stitches or bandages. I knew that my vet would want to send me home with one. But an E-collar for a Great Dane is wider than a big lampshade, doesn’t fit through doorways very well if at all, and is heavy. Leaving aside the question of how Teddy would react to one (not a question at all, really: he would hate it), I didn’t want one banging around the house. I had another option: the Bite-Not Collar, a hard plastic tube that fits a dog’s neck from ears to shoulders and prevents him from bending his neck to reach the stitches or bandages. I had bought one years ago for another dog, but she’d been a good patient and hadn’t needed to wear it. I didn’t think Teddy would like it any better than the E-collar, but since it would let him see where he was going and walk through a room without crashing into doorframes or furniture, there was at least a chance that it would work. Hope is good. So I pulled it out of a drawer and went to see if it would fit him.
It was, of course, a wasted effort. Teddy is a suspicious dog with a strong sense of self-preservation in the face of unknown sinister objects, and after one look at the plastic tube he decided he wanted no part of it. Whether it would fit him or not was moot, because his neck never got anywhere near it. So the Bite-Not Collar went back into its drawer, and I hit the computer to look for alternatives.
The device that looked least offensive was the Soft-E-Collar, an E-collar made of cloth-covered foam with a wired edge. A local store carried them and had them in stock. So we drove forty miles, picked our way through a downtown street-widening project and into the store’s minuscule parking lot, and emerged with the last one they had in Great Dane size. Once we got home, I threaded the thing onto a spare buckle collar and trapped Tasha to be a guinea pig. She’s more confident than Teddy and generally unlikely to attribute lethal intent to strange artifacts, but she was appalled by the Soft-E-Collar. Her first reaction was to freeze, and when that didn’t make it disappear, she spun around the room until I stopped her and took it off. After this display, there didn’t seem to be any point in forcing it onto Teddy, who would probably have gone catatonic if I’d put it on him. Since it wasn’t returnable, it went into the drawer, too. Now we’d have to hope he’d be a good patient.
After the collar failures, we had next to consider living arrangements. I knew, of course, that Teddy would need to be kept quiet until his stitches were out—outdoors on lead only, no stairs, and no playing with Tasha—but he sleeps in bed, and climbing up on a bed was also off-limits. The stairs could be blocked with baby gates, and Tasha would happily spend the day on the sofa in the TV room; I would sleep on the sofa in the living room, and I decided to get a dog bed for Ted. This was not quite a no-brainer, as Teddy treated our last dog beds like giant stuffed toys, and after he destroyed the zippers on several covers and then began eviscerating the beds and flinging their innards around the house, I had taken them all away. But I thought he might be more comfortable on something softer than a blanket on the carpet, so I bought a bed—but a cheap one, in case he rediscovered his taste for destruction.
The surgery went well, and Teddy spent the afternoon in recovery, letting the staff at the clinic know that he wasn’t a happy camper. I collected him late in the day and brought him home, and made him less happy still by wrapping him up in a pressure bandage, as instructed, for the rest of the evening. Ideally, it would have stayed on for a full twenty-four hours, but since he would only stand around and look abused while wearing it, I gave up and took it off. His incision was closed with staples rather than stitches, but they still had to be protected from licking or chewing. Since the restrictive collar option was out, at least as a first choice, Ted started wearing a T-shirt.
A few of my husband’s old T-shirts were still whole on the rag pile, and after a little judicious scissor work, they made very decent protective garments without being too binding.
I don't feel good and this thing doesn't help . . .
Teddy was not exactly thrilled, but at least he would lie down while wearing one. Not, however, on the dog bed. Not ever on the dog bed, which turned out to be as useless as the Soft-E-Collar.
Dog bed? I don't think so . . .
Things started getting better the day after surgery, when the aftereffects of the anesthesia finally wore off. Teddy was on pain medication for several days; it had a dampening effect as well, but since I didn’t want him to be active during that period, I was okay with that. By the end of the first week, he was off all medication, was on his second T-shirt (once you start cutting into them, they don’t last long), and was feeling enough like himself to chew his Nylabones.**
Sometimes I chewed a fuzzy instead . . .
I was pretty generally fed up with the sofa by then, and Teddy had gone from ignoring the dog bed to investigating it as a possible new toy. So we moved into the first-floor guest room, and life improved substantially.
The staples came out after fourteen days. By then Ted was feeling very perky indeed and was more than ready to shed the last T-shirt and get back to normal life.
Now I can kill this fuzzy!
Tasha was released from the TV room and was greeted by Teddy with more enthusiasm than she appreciated. He got to go out and run like a maniac (and, alas, find a couple of new places to try to dig). I got to go back to my own bed. After another week or so, Teddy chewed the zipper off the dog bed cover and made a good try at ripping the bed itself open, and I took it away and hid it.*** And I’m much more comfortable knowing that IF he should bloat, his stomach will stay where it belongs.
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* If there’s no torsion, the air in the stomach can be released through a stomach tube or by puncturing the stomach wall from the outside with a trocar (hollow needle). I was present when an emergency vet used a trocar on one of my dogs after he was unable to pass a stomach tube. It was effective and very dramatic.
** In almost forty years, he’s the only dog I’ve ever had that actually LIKES Nylabones. I’m amazed but grateful.
*** I was lucky and caught him before he could put a hole in the bed. It has since gone to a friend—a friend who sews—whose elderly Mastiff will not try to pull the stuffing out.
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