"Today I performed my first survival rat surgery. This means that the surgery was performed with the intent of the animal surviving and functioning, as opposed to a surgery where the animal is immediately sacrificed for autopsy and/or tissue analysis.
I didn't name my rat. She was quite pretty, with large red eyes that many other people would probably associate with evilness. To me though she looked quite cute. very curious, and friendly if only a bit timid. I really hope she wakes up, although that only means that she will be put down in a week or two."
So that was a week ago today. Last Friday, two days after surgery, she was doing fine, sniffing around the cage like any other rat. Monday around noon I went to lab and discovered her on her belly, quite stiff. She wasn't smelling terribly bad, so it's likely she only died early that morning or so.
It was really strange lifting her dead body. It wasn't the same feeling as picking her up when she was anesthetized. She was stiff and lifeless, retaining her rigor mortis state as I pulled her up by her tail to examine her. Her abdomen was dark and looked as if there were blood pooling inside. The stitches that I had closed her up with were intact and looked wonderful still, but things weren't working on the inside apparently.
We proceeded to operate on another rat, this time with a resident and my boss. They were trying to accomplish something a little more technically challenging than the first one I had done. It became increasingly frustrating and at one point, when we were tearing apart things that we weren't sure of what they were, some said, "Well we're not going for survival surgery here anymore." By the end we had shredded those little ureters of hers, which were only maybe a few hundred thick to begin with probably.
So here I was at the end, she lying there with a tube over her head that pumps anesthesia to her, legs splayed open, big incision down her belly, with all her guts spilled out to one size, bladder shredded in half, and no ureters to speak of. Ramzi did the ultimate act, pulling her tail until her neck and vertebrae sheared and snapped. I picked her up and together we put her in the plastic bag from the freezer where we had placed the first one.
We have one more test rat that we'll be working on tomorrow. Unfortunately she'll probably meet the same fate as the last.
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