Surgery

Surgery.

It's where you get to feel like a God, and it's a high like no other. When they show those scenes on medical dramas, with people standing in this almost silent room, watching as someone mends something that was otherwise irreparable, they're giving you a glimpse into another world.

When I step into surgery, my entire mindset changes. Getting a horse on the ground is the easy part, but after that, the adrenaline starts pumping. Intubate, get the horse on the table, clip the surgery site, scrub, wipe clean, tie the doctors in....it's a rush that I can't really describe.

There is this moment, when everything is done, that you breathe. You hear the beeping of the heart monitor, the soft woosh of a respiration, and then it begins.

"Cutting, Anesthesia."

With those two simple words, things are fixed. Wrongs are righted. An animal that came to us with an illness will leave healed and whole again. It's satisfying and perfect to exist in this timeless little world, where everything is smooth and easy, and even when it isn't it'll still all turn out OK. It's simplistic.

Then last night happened, and my view of surgery as somewhat of a safe haven was forever shaken.

One of our clients called us in a panic. Her horse had gone down and seized, and she was rushing him to us. When she got there, the horse was soaked and sweat and looked pained and frightened. We immediately did blood work, and found something that strikes fear into any vet: signs pointing towards a ruptured bowel. We tubed the horse and did an ab tap. In the ab tap we got one single drop of blood, but it was a deadly drop: it had sand in it.

His bowel had ruptured.

This is a death sentence for a horse. There is a literally 0% chance that a horse can survive their bowel rupturing. However, the owner wanted surgery. Now. So at 5PM, when the day should be over, myself and one of our doctors flew through surgery, preparing it and getting the horse under anesthesia by 5:30.

Logically, we all knew going into this that the horse would be dead on the table. Logically.

As a sobbing owner watched through our viewing window, our head doctor made a small incision in the horse's abdomen. A putrid odor came out, as did feces and blood. I went and told the owner, but she demanded we continue cutting, so we did. We opened him fully, and pulled out completely dead intestine, coated in chunks of feces and reeking of decay. Blood poured over the floor, literally gallons of it. At that point, our head doctor took off his gown and refused to go further. I got the euthanasia solution and we euthanized, with the owner's face pressed to the window as she cried.

It was heart wrenching in every possible way. But I was OK with it, because I thought I had dealt with it. But I hadn't. We wheeled the horse to the back of our hospital, and dragged his body away with a truck. I rinsed away the blood, forgetting the lingering stench and going home.

I couldn't sleep once I got into bed. My mind kept flashing to the dark red bowels, the green chunks of feces sitting on them and the occasional oat clinging to a crevasse. And worse, my mind kept flashing to us leaving his body at the back of the hospital, and not in the recovery room where he would wake up, alive and healthy.

I guess at some point we all have a moment that shakes our perfect little worlds, and this was it for me.

No doctor can cure everything, and surgery can't save every horse. But we do the best we can. We try, and we succeed more than we fail, and in that we can find our victory. If we can help a hundred but lose one in the process, it does not mean that it could've been helped. It means that we helped a hundred horses, and God took one of them.

God has blessed us with the one hundred.