Weeks 2, 3, and 4 : Surgery, Large Animal, and finishing

My second week at TOLFA, I was on the surgery rotation.  Most of the surgeries done are spays and castrations of street dogs, but there are a few other operations that are done as well. I saw mostly spays, but there was one limb amputation.  Since they don't have an X-ray or the resources to put in things like plates and screws to fix a severe fracture, the limb is just removed.  The dogs do just fine on 3 legs and don't seem to mind. 

The surgery suite is a room cooled only by a fan.  Since it needs to be as clean as possible, there is only the one door to go in an out and the window does not open.  Needless to say, it gets stiflingly hot in there, especially when the electricity goes out and the fan stops working. Sweat drips off of you and you start to wonder how sterile your procedure really is.  The latex gloves don't help, either.  My habds always look like I've been in the bath for too long after I take them off. It really makes you appreeciate our air-conditioned surgery rooms.  They are trying to get an air-conditioner, but they aren't cheap and neither is the electricity to run them. 

VET Reference:  They use TIVA since they don't have a gas anesthesia machine.  The only problem is that they don't have a CRI pump so you have to just go off physical signs and give a little more every time it looks like the animal is waking up, which means that sometimes they get a little light. They also do all flank spays, even on large dogs, which is sometimes very hard.  The viualization is basically nill with a flank spay, although it means that you can check the incision easily after surgery, which is good for the more aggressive dogs. We use the same drape, gloves, and pack for every surrgery because they simply don't have the resources to buy more. They also have a really old fashioned autoclave, though it gets the job done. END Vet Reference.

I got to do 3 spays and a castration while I was there, although most of what I learned how to do won't come in that handy for our surgery class at home since the technique is very different.  However, it was good to learn another way of doing things.  Overall I really liked my time on surgery.

My third week, I was placed on large animal treatments. It's amazing what they try to fix in cows.  At home, most of the things that we see at TOLFA would just be euthanized imediately because it wouldn't be worth the cost to fix it.  However, here they go so far as to amputate limbs from cows.  Apparently it buys them about anoher 8 months of life.  They also put casts on the cows, which isn't done at home, especially with some of the really serious fractures that we see here. 

One of the problems that I had on large animal was that animals that should have been euthanized were left alive for too long.  The problem is really that killing a cow just isn't done here, even if it would be better for the cow and it's going to die anyway.  If they do decide to euthanize a cow, they have to do it at night and most of the staff doesn't know that it happened. The men that work with the cows really seem to care about them, but just can't make the decision to put them down because it's so ingrained that it's wrong. 

The state of the cows in the streets here (yes there are really cows everywhere) is really pretty apalling.  No one really wants the responsibility of taking care of them, so they end up just wandering the streets and eating trash.  The problem comes when they eat plastic along with the trash and end up with literally kilos of plastic in their rumens.  Most of them are pretty sedate, but there are a few that are definitely not and will try to get you with their horns as you walk by. I was talking to a shop-keeper and he was complaining that children sometimes get hurt by the cows, but no one will do anything about it. At the same time, you have to ask yourself what they could possibly do.  If there isn't money to feed and house the cows, then there isn't any money.  He was saying that he wanted the government to do something about it, but there are so many cows it would take a fortune to round them all up and put them someplace.

For my last week, I was back on dog treatments and did some more surgery as well.  It was much harder to leave than I was anticipating and I can see how someone could come for one month and decide to stay for longer.  The people working at TOLFA are wonderful, friendly, and very helpful.  They are also incedibly funny once they sort of come out of their shells.  I will miss both the human and the animal friends that I made. 

Dad arrives tomorrow and then we start traveling around Rajasthan for 2 weeks.  Hopefully the rains will start so it colls off a bit.