A tough pill to swallow...

Here is the most recent update on Remington's surgery...

I contacted Purdue's Small Animal Clinic on Friday.  After getting a referral from our current vet they were more than happy to speak with me about the surgery. They have several vets in house that specialize in soft tissue surgeries.  The type of surgery that we are discussing doing with Remington is something that their surgeons are very familiar with and do on a routine basis. What would happen is we would bring him in for a consultation to go over Remington's medical history.  They would do testing on him for 2-3 hours to make sure he is healthy enough to have the surgery.  If he is... then we would leave him there that night and they would perform the surgery next day.  He would then stay at the hospital for 2-3 days after the surgery because they would need to keep a close eye on him and manage his pain levels accordingly.  While there he would be monitored 24 hours a day until we came to pick him up. We would also receive calls on a daily basis to update us on how he is doing.

Now... here is what is tough to swallow.  The price they quoted us for the surgery is between $800-$1300.  YIKES!  However, this would cover the consultation, blood work/tests, anesthesia, the removal of the anal glands, pain medication, and his stay at the hospital after the surgery.  It is a lot of money for us to spend and will definitely put a huge dent in our savings, but we absolutely feel it is worth it for him to have people that specialize in this and for the amount of care he will get.

We have scheduled the consultation for May 17th... which means he will have the surgery on the 18th.  We decided on this date specifically because the way Dan and I's schedule work out we would have 13 days where one of us would be with Remington during the recovery process.

At this point in time I feel very much at peace with the decision.  I don't feel like we could do anything more to ensure that Remington have the best outcome possible for this surgery.  I am planning on documenting the recovery process because as I was looking for information on this subject is was incredibly hard to find anything out there that would tell me what to expect.  I'm sure that there will be many more posts concerning this :)