Spaying a Cat

We recently took our cat Sumatra to the vet to have her spayed. We weren't really sure what to expect from a vet in a developing country. First, we had to travel to another city, which took about two hours. Meanwhile, the cat was in a cardboard box with holes in it and she quickly made those holes big enough to stick her entire head out. That was possibly the longest two hours of our lives. We arrived at the local rotary club, where the procedure would be performed. It was a big empty building with a wooden table and a freestanding chalkboard. I was thinking that there must be a hidden operating room that we don’t know about with all the sterile medical equipment. The vet arrived with his assistant and they moved the chalkboard so that the wooden table was hidden for a little privacy. Apparently this would be the table where he would slice open our little cat (Let me emphasize the word little. She’s full grown and is less than six pounds.). The whole procedure was done right on top of that wooden table. No latex gloves were used. Maybe that’s normal? My partner watched some of the surgery, but I just couldn't manage to look at a big gaping hole in her stomach and her uterus just lying on the table. The surgery went fairly well. She had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia, but otherwise Sumatra was doing alright. I’ve read online that typically you let the cat stay overnight at the vet’s to recover from the surgery. In doing so, you miss out on the entire period during which the cat is still anesthetized and acting like a drunk. Her head was wobbling around like a bobble-head cat, and she would try to walk, but then would promptly fall down. We were worried about her trying to bite out the sutures, but they don’t have those convenient plastic cones that are used back home. So we made our own little cone using poster board and taped it around her neck. It was rather entertaining watching her stumble around the house, bumping into everything with the cone, and barely able to keep her head up with the added weight of the cone. Our amusement ended fairly quickly when we woke up the next morning and found that all but two of her stitches were gone. She now had a wide open incision on her stomach, about an inch long. The vet was not worried about it and we would have to wait two more days to get her stitched up again. I was told to meet the vet at one of the gas stations out on the main road. So I loaded up Sumatra in the cardboard box again. This time she didn’t attempt to break out of the box. She was shaking and probably had a fever. The vet arrived at the gas station. He opened up the back of his station wagon, put down a piece of cardboard and voila….a new operating table. He was on his way to an important government meeting, so he quickly stitched up Sumatra. Everything was great for four days, until the stitches came out yet again. I’ve never had a cat spayed back home, but I have to imagine it goes a little smoother than what we’ve been experiencing. It doesn’t help that most people here do not have pet cats and of those individuals that have pet cats, the percentage of them that get their cats spayed is very small. We eventually got her stitched back up a third time and cut a hole in a piece of cardboard to stick around her neck. The vet that stitched her up this time had never worked on a cat before. She told me that our pets are spoiled. I said, yes, that is usually what happens with pets in the states. (She didn’t even react to the cat sleeping adorably in her own little hammock!) Now on to the de-clawing….