Jagaa, the dog.

Sorry I haven't been better about updating! I would like to share with you all my best story of late. I hope you don't mind blood and guts. Seriously, don't read this if you do. Just be assured that the story has a happy ending.

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So my site mate John Russell's dog keeps trying to kill itself. It was I who first found her a day or two before Christmas, collapsed in the middle of the biggest intersection in town during a fairly heavy snowfall, and it was just because her impending doom was so immediate that she is the one puppy to which I've given in and that I've taken home. Fortunately, John was willing to atone for my mistake and adopt her. Her name is Jagaa, short for Jargal noghoy (happy dog.)

She has stopped to pee in front of several rapidly advancing cars. She leans right down into open manholes. She scales furniture to poison herself on large quantities of chocolate. While we were walking along the frozen river a month ago (which was holding our weight just fine,) she managed to fall through the ice behind us while we weren't looking and was dramatically rescued by a herdsman.

John and frozen Jagaa

So, we figured she shouldn't reproduce. The local Choibalsan veterinarian volunteered to fix her for free so that her students could get some experience and exposure. The alternative would have been a slightly-less-than-200k tugruk (about $180, or 80% of our monthly salary) procedure at the real vet in UB. John decided to go with the free one.

So last Tuesday we took her in to the Technical college and she got fixed. She was not completely anesthetized through this procedure (apparently they don't do it that way here) so four vet students were holding her down while the vet and her protege did the fixing. She was clearly displeased.

Friday night, the time of evening comes to change her bandages. This is the third night of doing this so no biggie. We're over at our other site mate Danny's house, and many of the soumers (village volunteers) are in visiting. We take the dog into the kitchen to swap gauze, when we notice that there's a lot of blood. We flip her over onto her back, and carefully undo the Ace bandage. The gauze is super bloody. And then her intestines pop out.

I'm not talking about a little bit here. At first there were several inches out. Jagaa is freaking out, as is, understandably, John. I rush into the other room to grab help from the other volunteers. I tell one of them to start iodizing water and grabbing gloves from the med kit. I try to call the Choibalsan vet three times on her number and several more times on the numbers of her co-workers. It's 9pm on a Friday, so nobody answers.

I call the vet in UB and ask for advice on my phone while continuing to make calls on other people's phones. She says it's not life-threatening so long as we can wrap the whole mess up. We start flicking the iodized water across her guts to keep them wet and clean and avoid oxidation. By this time the dog is throwing up, and every time she does more intestine comes out. The protruding amount ends up being larger than two baseballs but smaller than a football. A soum volunteer, Jason, is in gloves and is holding the guts on the dog's stomach so that they don't touch the kitchen floor while John and Danny hold her top and bottom halves so that she stays on her back. She is... agitated. Jason soaks fresh gauze in iodized water and uses it to cover the pile.

I get Merrie, the volunteer from the technical college, to come over, and call the vet from her phone. It finally gets through, so I put Geoff, our best speaker by far, on the line and he explains the situation. She wants to wait until tomorrow morning. We explain that no, this needs to happen now. I concede to the demand that I come pick her up in a taxi. At 10 o'clock, Merrie, one of our Mongolian friends Munkhtuya, and I get a taxi and race to the vet's house, her protege's house, and the school to pick up medical supplies.

We get back around 10:30pm. Her guts have been out for just under an hour and a half. We clean the kitchen table and start sterilizing stuff. Jagaa gets two shots of local anesthetic, which don't appear to do very much. Danny and John continue to hold her down while Jason continues to keep the intestines in place while the vet carefully threads them back inside. I'm running around cleaning and grabbing things like scissors and antibiotic ointment, and cleaning up dog puke from the floor. The dog doesn't seem too agonized during this part. The guts are back in by 11:15.

Then came the bitch, as it were. The vet had poor eyesight, and could therefore not do the stitches. She hadn't been able to perform the original ones either. Causality? Perhaps. The vet student had to sew her stomach muscles back up, and then her skin. The dog was thrashing. By this point John, Danny, and Jason are using their actual bodyweight to hold her down. She is a 20 pound dog. Adrenaline's a hell of a thing. Things actually got worse near the end because there appear to be much more nerve endings in skin than in organs.

She was all sewn back up at 12:15pm, three hours into the incident. We thanked the vets and paid for the drugs and their taxi ride back. We agreed that it was the worst night of several of our lives. John got Jagaa safely huddled into a corner where she passed out while giving all of us the evil eye.

And then we drank.


We were gun-shy of the ordeal happening all over again-same stitches and stitcher after all-and I was flying in for a conference on Sunday anyway, so I took the dog with me to get redone at the vet in UB. The logistics of flying with a dog in Mongolia were a big hassle, but less than I imagine a repeat would have been. The original procedure had only removed her ovaries, not her uterus, and due to the possibility of cancer that's apparently a big reason to get a female dog fixed in the first place. So John ended up dropping more than 200k on the UB procedure, plus another 100k for round-trip airfare that wouldn't have been necessary if he'd just driven in with her under less critical circumstances. Jagaa was none too pleased with her third surgery in a week, but is now pretty healthy aside from still being on antibiotics. The UB vet found the beginnings of a serious internal infection when they opened her up, so it turns out that the UB trip was definitely the right call.

Lesson learned. Guys, pay for the expensive surgery from the beginning. It's worth it.

The post-op victory picture. Stone Cold Jagaa is a Stone Cold fox.