Poor Maya. She's just at the stage, post-op, where all her energy is back, but she's not allowed to run, jump or even play tug-of-war because of her fresh stitches. She already managed to rip them open once last night, when she was first getting her energy back...we're very relieved that she's lively and happy again, but it isn't a good thing for her recuperation!

We also found out something interesting about the whole procedure: in Britain and America, when a female dog is spayed, the vets typically take out not only the ovaries but also the uterus because (this is the shortened version of the explanation which our vet gave us - I'm sure there's a more complex rationale in there somewhere!) they might as well get it out at the same time in order to prevent cancer from ever developing in the uterus in the future. In the continental European countries, however, especially in Germany and Austria, vets are committed to only taking out the ovaries themselves in order to effect minimum trauma and not take out any organs without an immediate medical necessity.

Of course, as soon as the vet told us that, my first reaction was: I wish we were still living in Vienna! Because - at least from my non-medically-trained standpoint - doesn't the Germanic attitude make more sense? From what I've gathered, human doctors used to also take the attitude that they might as well take out "unnecessary" organs like tonsils and even appendices just to keep anything from going wrong in future, but nowadays they've switched to only taking them out when absolutely necessary...

Oh well. Needless to say, when I was actually standing in the vet's office listening to the explanation, I didn't have the guts to say "In that case, don't take out her uterus!" because (being a gutless wonder in all social situations) I didn't have the nerve to question his decision.

And (equally predictably) ever since then I've been simmering quietly about it.

But at least she'll never have uterine cancer, and that's certainly a good thing.

Anyway...

In other news, I finished re-reading Jane Eyre this morning and loved it through to the end. St John Rivers is one of the scariest characters I've ever read, and I love Jane's strength in managing to resist him (even when he threatens her with going to Hell if she refuses him, since he is, after all, speaking straight from God's will!) (and he genuinely believes it, too - that's one of the reasons he's so scary).

And in even better news, the last two presents I ordered for Patrick's birthday just arrived five minutes ago. Hurray! Just three more days to wait...