They came by two

I have slowly learned that the moment that I think I've seen it all, something new will be right around the corner. So it was when I went to examine a young puppy for the first time. I always start at the head and make my way back. I kind of got stuck on the mouth. As you can see from the picture, this puppy had two baby canine teeth (or 604s using the proper terminology) on her left upper jaw. I told her owners that we would need to remove both teeth when she was under general anesthetic for her spay. This is necessary to make room for the adult tooth to come in properly. Having two teeth blocking the adult tooth is bad news.

We scheduled her spay for 16 weeks of age. Once we were done with that procedure, we did dental radiographs to make sure the adult tooth was there (which it was). Then came the delicate work. In order to remove the two baby teeth, I needed to make a flap which you can see in the bottom picture. I always find it interesting that people think it is so easy to remove baby teeth. The root makes up two-thirds of the whole tooth. Break the root off and you have doubled your work load. In this case you also have to take into account that no harm can come to the adult tooth. It is very delicate at this stage.

Wonder what I'm going to see next!

Surgical Surprises

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.