Category Archives: Surgery

The winter holiday season is the setting for Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale The Little Match Girl. The story features a child, alone and outdoors in the freezing cold, sustained by visions of warmth, delicious food and a loving family. Like many fairy tales, The Little Match Girl does not have a happy ending. The tale of Esme the cat—told in the blogpost below—is very much like the story of The Little Match Girl, except Esme’s story will have a happy ending.

Earlier this month, the Schwarzman Animal Medicine Center hosted a continuing education lecture for AMC’s partner veterinarians. This evening event featured Drs. Pamela Schwartz and Daniel Spector of the Denise and Michael Kellen Institute for Surgical Care. They presented the exciting upgrades in surgical capabilities in our new surgery suites. While veterinarians will gawk at the innovative tools and techniques now available to AMC veterinary surgeons, these advances may not be fully appreciated by pet parents who are primarily concerned with their pets’ outcome, not necessarily how it was achieved. I’ll try to translate these improvements for pet parents in today’s blogpost.

The month of March has two holidays for math lovers. Many readers may already know about Pi Day, or 3/14, which celebrates the first three digits of the mathematical constant Pi. Those of us that love animals may be more familiar with Triday, 3/3, a day dedicated to the resilient pets that have undergone a limb amputation and thrived as “tripawds.” Limb amputations in pets are performed to correct injuries and treat bone infections and cancer. In today’s blogpost, I’ll discuss the medical situations that may necessitate amputation and some of the emotional considerations of this surgery.

July 12th marks Julius Caesar’s 2124th birthday. Medically, this date is important because a common surgery, the Caesarean section, is named in Mr. Caesar’s honor, even though there’s no proof he was delivered through this surgery. Often referred to as a C-section, this surgery is performed when offspring are delivered through an abdominal incision rather than through the birth canal. The word “offspring” is a calculated decision on my part. C-sections are common in human medicine, but veterinarians will also deliver puppies, kittens, calves, lambs and the occasional bird or turtle via a C-section. C-section surgery is as important to animal health as it is to human health.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a lecture by my colleague Dr. Rob Hart, Director of Orthopedic and Joint Replacement Surgery at AMC. Not surprisingly, he spoke about hip replacement surgery. Being a medical type and not surgical at all, I found his presentation fascinating. Going into the talk, I had thought total hip replacement was primarily a treatment for hip dysplasia, but I learned there are more reasons for a total hip replacement and thought my readers would find these bits of information interesting as well.