This week we had a couple of surprises when it came to our surgeries. The first one had the owners, staff and I laughing. A new client brought in the families new 16 week old kitten to be neutered. They had been told it was a male but the kids wanted to call him Dolly. When we are admitting for surgery we always double check just to be sure. Well…..turns out he was actually a she and the kids had found the perfect name!
The other neat find was when we were getting ready to do a spay on a 6 month old small breed dog. My AHT, Kelly, asked me to take a quick peak at the mouth as there were some retained baby teeth. There were five upper baby incisors that needed to come out but the bottom teeth were the most intriguing. There were only three adult incisors (supposed to have six) and the baby canine teeth hadn’t fallen out which was causing the adult teeth to erupt to the inside of the mouth.
This can become a major problem. If we did not remove the baby teeth, the adult teeth would continue to erupt improperly and would end up damaging the hard palate. My mouth hurt just thinking about what could happen. I took a quick dental radiograph to make sure nothing else was going on in the lower jaw.
Once I was done with the routine spay, I extracted the baby teeth. This is the one time we do not suture the incisions closed. We want to give the adult teeth every chance to move outward to their normal position.
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