Thursday, March 15th, we brought in 17 more cats to the PAWS-Chicago Spay/Neuter clinic to be fixed. 13 of them were ferals while the other 4 were 'friendly ferals'.

During the pre-op exam of the friendly ferals, Dr. Cirillo made it known to me that one of our cats had a heart murmur and thus a possibly increased risk of adverse outcome during the surgery. She double-checked with the chief veterinarian, Dr. Von Waldau, who said that she would be willing to do the surgery, but only if we signed a waver stating that we understood the risks. These decisions are never easy; yes, you do want to get the cat fixed but no, of course not, do you want to cat to run any increased risk. And the decision point is never black-and-white - it's always on a scale. We decided to go ahead with the surgery and, thankfully, the cat came through it just fine.

I picked up the cats from Tammy in the morning and brought them to PAWS and then picked them up from PAWS in the evening and brought them back to Tammy's for recovery. Normally at this time of year, she's covering up the ferals in the garage with several electric blankets at night during their recovery, but with our now very-unseasonably warm temperatures, this was certainly not required today!

One of the ferals turns out to have already been neutered, so our final count today was 16 cats fixed. This brings us to a total of 48 for March, 127 for the year and 3,632 overall.