In last week’s veterinary medicine segment, I began the story of one of my worst days ever as a surgeon and a practitioner. I ended after I had dropped and broken the anesthetic, finished one cat with a different type of anesthesia, and lost the next cat under anesthesia (our first death in over 500 animals). As we pushed on and started our third cat, thinking we were finally getting back into the regular routine, it just wasn’t meant to be. This cat went to sleep far enough to handle, but not far enough for surgery, so we went to put her on the anesthesia machine for a little bit of inhalent gas to top things off. When we turned on the oxygen, we weren’t getting a proper flow. In fact, we weren’t getting much at all! We had just used the machine while doing CPR and everything had been fine! Even though we don’t usually need the oxygen, it’s very dangerous to do surgery without access to it, so that pretty much put an end our surgery day.

Our director, one of our officers, Mary, and I spent the next couple hours tracing the oxygen lines, taking apart connections and replacing them, and looking for the problem. We were able to trace it to a valve that controls the oxygen flow rate on the machine, and were able to have the part overnighted to us. The next morning one of our officers was in the far end of Gainesville (about an hour’s drive from our office) at 7:30 am to pick up the part and get it to us. When it arrived at the office we put it on the machine, and although things were better, the oxygen flow still wasn’t right. In our efforts to get it working correctly, we broke the brand new valve! I was beside myself and just wanted to cry! But still wanting to salvage the situation, I made another call to my old practice, in hopes that they might have a machine that we could borrow (they had bought a new one not long ago, and had been trying to sell the old one). But in keeping with the rest of this story, they had just sold their old one a week ago.

We were about to start calling people and telling them to come get their cats when my old partner at the practice called and suggested that we bring the cats out there. They weren’t using their machine that day, but they couldn’t be without it altogether in case there was an emergency. At first, the thought seemed crazy. It was already pushing 10:30 am and we had sixteen by now very cranky cats to do. It would take some time to get all the cats and all of our supplies loaded up and then a half hour to drive out, but we didn’t want to put all those cats back into their colonies still intact. By the next month the pregnant ones would have had kittens, the ones in heat would be pregnant, and some of them probably would never go near a trap again. So we decided to give it our best shot. Everyone in our office pitched in and we got things loaded up in record time. When we got to Chiefland, the people in their office helped us unload and get set up. We were starting surgeries by 11:30 am. I figured we would get as many as we could done at least.

Mary and I worked through the entire afternoon without lunch or bathroom breaks, but we actually finished all of our cats and even spayed one for Chiefland Animal Hospital! Their staff was there for an extra fifteen minutes waiting on us to get loaded up again (and again they helped us), but we didn’t even keep them too late. When we got back to our office it was after 6:00 pm (our office closes at 4:00 pm), but one of our officers who lives close was there waiting to help us unload and get all the cats settled. The moral to this story is that teamwork is the way to make a bad situation work out. TNR always requires teamwork from the caregivers, to the surgical team, to the office staff who do scheduling and paperwork, but this particular month it took more than usual. So if you’re ever in Central Florida and you see a white pickup truck driving around with a bunch of cats in cages in it, it’s just the crazy cat ladies running around trying to find a place to fix cats! Many, many thanks to Mary for keeping me somewhat sane during all of this. Thanks to my friend and colleague Susan for the amazing idea and for allowing us to use the facility, and a huge thanks to my staff and the Chiefland Animal Hospital staff for pitching in so willingly to help get this done.