Okay, so I just picked up the Frenchie and she is out of it, but otherwise in excellent shape. Whew.
She has sutures in her little nose (my dog had a nose job!) and a new scar where her womb used to be, but everything else is the way it was 48 hours ago.
I'm so relieved she's been spayed. I wish I could have done it earlier but there were a few issues preventing it (be ye not like me! spay and neuter your pets!!). First of all, we stupidly promised our breeder we'd wait an entire year to do it (and let her have one heat, so she could "bloom"...which was actually split in to TWO heats and both ordeals were fucking miserable for all of us. it's called a "split heat". joy.). We didn't know any better...we've waited for a puppy from Fantasia for FOUR YEARS. And this was a show-quality dog with a champion pedigree and a price tag to match. She is actually the most expensive thing I own. The point is, our other dog came to us spayed at eight weeks because the Washington Humane Society doesn't release animals without cutting them. We've never even had to consider a spay before. The rescue dog came that way. But this? This was our first purebred.
By the time she was a year old, we had to shift our priorities (and finances) to save even MORE money for her rare and costly eye surgery. I could always throw diapers on her and suffer for a few weeks a year until I was flush enough to pay for a spay, but blindness (which is what she's heading for) is forever. She needs a Parotid Duct Transposition, a procedure where they reroute her salivary gland to her completely dry right eye. Right now, I'm manually keeping her eye wet by wrestling her into submission and squirting eye drops in her face up to 12 a day-- good thing I'm UNEMPLOYED. Who has time for this?
But wait, you say! She just got spayed! Did you win the lottery?!
No.
Sigh. I wish.
She was scheduled for her Parotid Duct Transposition once I found an amazing, board certified surgeon in Maryland who wouldn't charge the same price as a Chanel 2.55 for her PDT. In fact, her price was so low, we could afford the spay/nose job, too...I just had to drive an hour each way from D.C. to Annapolis for the next few months. Done. So anyway, she was supposed to have her PDT on 2.11 but we had to cancel it because they were afraid she was going into heat and couldn't operate on her if she was. She'd started peeing in the house daily (she is housebroken) and her...um...ugh. Her nipples were bleeding. Her hormones were all over the fucking place. So I asked on the 11th if we could quickly spay her and head off all that smelly bleeding. The vet agreed and that's why she got spayed yesterday.
If I could do it over again, I'd
a) have more money (hee!)
b) do the spay around seven months so she'd be smaller AND not have these giant nips. Yeah, I know. I'm a woman grown. I should be more mature and less superficial. But my puppy has these really prominent nipples to go with her puppy-bearing-hips and they are super noticeable. They also make rubbing her tummy a bit of an obstacle course. Anyway.
For what it's worth, the breeder was right-- she DID bloom after her first heat. Her face and body changed, her head got bigger and she transformed in front of us from a roly poly puppy to a beautiful, mature dog. So I get why the breeder advised us to do it, I just don't ever want to experience a dog in heat EVER AGAIN, so I think I'll risk a smaller head and a "forever a puppy"-look if I'm in this situation in the future. The moral of this story? SPAY AND NEUTER YOUR PETS.
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