Day Three

Stuff doesn’t gross me out anymore. Well, veterinary stuff specifically. Rotting food will make me gag and babies’ snot will make me go sterile. But animals with their skin pulled off or their bone sticking out doesn’t do anything for me. Even emotionally I have a huge disconnect. Of course I get sad when I see a little puppy that is barely making it, but in this field you can either sit there and cry for the fate of the dog, or move on and do something about it. The way I am is that I have moved on before even meeting these animals.

The point of all this is that the dog with the maggot wound did not gross me out or make me sad, so chasing down this resistant dog so I could stick my fingers in her maggot hole was not a problem for me. The only problem is that the medical history of this dog is unknown, and given her status, probably nonexistent anyway. The guards of the house where this dog lives, plus the guards from my friend’s house helped us chase her down and tackle her while I jammed her full of 3 mL of Xylosin, a short-acting anesthetic. After 10 minutes she was down, but still lazily snapping at the flies that buzzed around her nose.

There was not a lot of time to perform our healing magic, and we didn’t know if the owners would be coming home soon, or if they were watching from the windows. In retrospect it was probably not the wisest decision to do this from where they could see it, but in the heat of the moment you do what you have to do. First we applied an antiseptic to the wound site, cleaning it all the way in and around. Next we filled the hole with turpentine oil, which brings the maggots out from the wound. After a few minutes no maggots appeared, so I used forceps to dig inside of the leg. Even though the wound was deep, no maggots remained, so we cleaned, sterilized, and wrapped it up. There was a smaller maggot wound on the other back leg, and it to was free of the tiny beasts. The dog woke up, hot and dazed, and crawled under a car to recover.

We packed up the tools we bought on Ebay and went on to the next case.