Oogy_ The Dog Only a Family Could Love - Larry Levin [47]
Dr. Bianco asked me to let him rebuild Oogy’s face. He informed me he had never before performed facial reconstructive surgery to the extent Oogy needed it, but at the same time, he had every confidence in his ability to successfully complete the procedure. Although the scope of damage and deformity presented a great challenge, Dr. Bianco assured me that when the procedure had been completed, Oogy’s life would be better than it currently was. Dr. Bianco also promised me that when he was done, Oogy would be the “Brad Pitt of dogdom.”
Our confidence in Dr. Bianco’s surgical skills was such that we had no doubt of the outcome — the operation would be a complete success. I think one reason we felt this way was that we knew the surgery was something Dr. Bianco wanted to do for Oogy’s well-being.
In what turned out to be a three-and-a-half-hour operation, Dr. Bianco first removed all the scar tissue down to the muscle. Later, he told me that after all the scar tissue was taken out, there was a hole in Oogy’s head the size of a softball. He held up a closed fist to give me some idea of the extent. Next, Dr. Bianco took off the remaining stump of an ear and all the skin surrounding it that had become embedded with scar tissue. He undermined the skin — removed its attachment to the underlying muscle — in order to allow it to reattach naturally instead of by adhering to the scar tissue. Dr. Bianco then pulled up a flap of skin from Oogy’s neck and joined it to the fur on the back of his muzzle with skin grafts he removed from the insides of his front legs. During this part of the surgery, Dr. Bianco’s chief concern was that there might not be enough skin to complete the reconstructive process, but there was. Next, because covering a natural opening might lead to problems with postoperative draining, Dr. Bianco located the spot where Oogy’s left ear had been and made a small hole in the side of Oogy’s cranium. He then created an artificial horizontal canal into Oogy’s skull from the little hole that was now all that was left of Oogy’s ear. This would help avoid infection postsurgery. Dr. Bianco did not bother to replicate the vertical canal that had been torn out when Oogy had been attacked, since Oogy would never be able to hear from this ear no matter what.
The day after the surgery, I was allowed to visit Oogy in the hospital portion of the building. This was a special privilege I was given only because the patient was Oogy. The left side of Oogy’s face was swollen and distorted, and he appeared bruised, as though he had been beaten. A black line of fine stitches ran down the left side of his face, which had been shaved down to his baby pink skin; a second, horizontal line of stitches helped stabilize the flaps of flesh that had been joined. There were blue gauze wraps on his forelegs, protecting the spots where the skin had been removed for the grafts. There was a Penrose drain in his head that ran from the upper left quadrant of his skull and came out the underside of his jaw. Blood and some clear, viscous fluid continually seeped out of the bottom of the drain. He looked more forlorn than any dog should ever have to be. He slept in the largest cage the hospital had, but it was still a cage, and I knew it created anxiety for him. Yet the accommodations were unavoidable, and although before the operation I could not have envisioned what he would look like, the surgery clearly had proved to be a complete success. He no longer looked terrifying (I’m not sure a dog with one ear can ever be described as normal-looking),