11/9/05 Mike gets his wish granted again!

I’ll enjoy life when it gets back to boring old stuff in the clinic.

Mike, Peggy and I are heading over to Carriacou this afternoon for another sailing regatta. Originally, we were going to head over this morning but we wanted to see how Suede would do today; she will head back home this afternoon! So Mike and I went into the clinic to check on her and then we were going to go snorkeling.

Of course someone came in to be seen but not just another mangie puppy. This guy brought in his little 4 month old female Mona monkey! These monkeys were brought to Grenada by some Spanish explorers long ago and have thrived in the forest.

The monkey had a laceration through her right cheek that the owner said was opening up further and further. He had tried to take her to the SGU Veterinary School but they told him that they weren’t allowed to work on monkeys (diseases and silly stuff like that) but that he should try the GSPCA. Now that’s funny because neither Mike nor I know anything about monkeys except that they carry some bad diseases and can be unpredictable. I told the owner that all we could do was give her some antibiotics and hope the infection would stop spreading. This guy wouldn’t take no for an answer and kept asking us to just put in some sutures (yeah, cause it’s just that easy). I eventually told him that we could try but since we'd never worked with primates before, his pet could die under anesthesia. “What do you mean die?” he asked. To try to drive this point home I replied “Dude, your monkey could die, D-E-A-D!” He decided to take the chance because God was with him.

So instead of a quick morning in the clinic we gave this monkey an injection of ketamine to sedate her. We were able to place an endotracheal tube and put her on gas anesthesia. Mike monitored anesthesia and I was able to clean up the wound and place multiple sutures. It ended up not looking too bad in the end but the skin was extremely thin so I hope that the sutures were buried enough to not be irritating. Fortunately she woke up fairly quickly and was able to go home with her relieved owner. I asked him to bring her back for a recheck in a week. Yeah, right!