Until Blood Started Mysteriously Pooling Out of Nowhere

The curriculum's vision of "spey class" doesn't align well with the reality.

1. There are often not enough speys in a week for all four students.
2. People seem to cancel these appointments at an alarming rate.
3. The animals we do get aren't exactly young and healthy.

Earlier in the week, my classmate's spey was some several hour ordeal that involved many stacks of blood-soaked gauze and a uterus as thick as hose pipe. My spey got cancelled completely because of a UTI. My friend shared her spey with me, which turned out to be a 4-year-old shelter dog that came off of heat a week ago.

Now, when they're in heat, their uterus gets huge and very vascular. This complicates things because the usually teeny vessels become a lot bigger and you have to worry more about tying them all off, and as you can imagine, a big hose pipe is harder to clamp off than a small one. Despite this, everything was going mostly hunky-dory--at least, until blood started mysteriously pooling out of nowhere.

It started as a general oozing, an unusual amount of fluid down in the body cavity. Gradually, the pinky-orangey fluid deep down turned into really-quite-red fluid all over my side of the dog.

When you do a spey, you tie off the vessels that connect the ovary to the body, then cut the ovary off; this leaves you with a pedicle of tissue and tied-off vessels that you drop back into the body. You check this to make sure you really got the vessels all closed off, or else they just keep bleeding forever. If you accidentally drop the pedicle before you're ready, or the ligature is too loose and comes off, it's called a "dropped stump" and is what gives fledgling vet students night terrors. No matter how many times your professors explain the steps to find and retrieve your dropped stump, it's still a tiny fleshy blob in the middle of a bunch of other fleshy blobs, all submerged beneath an ocean of blood with a rapidly rising tide. It hasn't happened to me, but I saw a vet deal with it once.

This isn't what happened today, but now you can understand why I became alarmed that my severed pedicle was suddenly sitting in a pool of blood. The vet teaching us took some time to check out the stump, search around in the body cavity, and couldn't find the source, so he was like, "Nevermind that, we'll worry about it later," and my friend finished her ovary and we went on to the uterine body.

As time went on, the oozing-become-pooling didn't subside, and the vet kept checking but then deciding we'd "worry about it later." Since he couldn't figure out what was going on (my stump wasn't what was bleeding, phew), he had the nurses page the surgical resident. She joined us, and even she couldn't figure out where all the blood was coming from. They hooked up suction and diathermy, packed the abdomen with laparotomy sponges, and threw in a whole bunch of ligatures onto various fleshy blobs, but it didn't seem to change much. The blood was coming from everywhere and nowhere.

Eventually, they got it from "pooling" back to "oozing" and decided to close up the wound, but when discussing medications with me, made the point that she could require a second emergency surgery if it turned out she kept bleeding on the inside. Fortunately there are a bazillion people in the ICU whose job it is to keep an eye on patients like this one. However, as four hours of sore feet can attest, the vet made the very good point that dogs on heat are not very good cases for student spey classes.