Surgery for Dogs & Cats
Surgery is something that is easier for us to understand than say, internal medicine, or even dermatology. Trying to explain (and understand) things like autoimmune skin disorders, or liver or endocrine problems ( hormonal disease) can be hard work. Surgery though, is more like carpentry or sewing, and so has a visual comprehension that most of us can get a grip on.
We do a lot of surgery here at Bateau Bay Vets. It wouldn't be unusual to do something very routine like female and male desexing with about 10 or 15 patients a day.
With something like a female cat desex for instance, we can go skin to skin in about six minutes, or even less, so turning these kinds of numbers over is really quite easy.
Complex Procedures
Apart from that we do some more complex procedures that often are only done in referral centres. Specialty surgery vets with fellowship qualifications do very good work because thats all they do, so with major procedures they are unquestionably the best places to go, but specialty practice has high fixed overheads and often they will only deal with 3 or 4 patients a day, so the invoices all have commas in them.
Good reason for pet insurance. There are some procedures that can only be done in referral centres. Cataract surgery. Joint replacement, like hips and the very rarely done elbow and knee canine surgery. Spinal and intracranial surgery.
Apart from those definitely leave alone procedures, we do stuff like we have done in the last few weeks like complex long bone fractures, using techniques called monocortical pin and plate procedures, calcaneoquartal arthrodesis, arytenoid lateralisation, Type I-II hybrid distal humeral fractures.
Sounds like alphabet soup, I know, but when you see the diagrams, easily comprehended. And we do a lot of the more commonly undertaken orthopaedic procedures like cruciate repair as detaled in our othopaedic surgery page. We do a lot of eyelid surgery involving correcting rolled in eyelids called entropion, cherry eyes and eyelid tumour resection.
There has been a large generational shift in surgical skills in the veterinary profession, with an increasing dependency on referral centres to do even fairly basic procedures, but shop around. There are still some generalists out there who can do major surgery without the high pricing that comes with the reduction in competition with specialist dependancy.