So don’t tell me it’s comparing to anesthetizing the …” And so I would just almost get cataleptic about doing it, and finally I said, “It’s gotta be done.” I said, “Who else do you want anesthetizing it with you?” And I said, “You’ve gotta do it.” So went ahead and did it, and her hematocrit was eight, which would mean, she was just almost to the point of dying for the lack of blood was my diagnosis. And her kidney function was down the hill, and her BUN was high, and so here I was with one panda under anesthesia, they had eight hematocrit, and so I said, “My God, we need a blood transfusion.” So the only other panda was right next door, so it wasn’t dieted, so I anesthetized it, I had two giant panda down at the same time, so we collected two units of blood from the male, gave it to the female, and then I went again looking for help on the kidney failure part of it, so there was a urology conference in Washington DC right down the block, so I called up again the Children’s Hospital and said, you know, and they said, “Well, they’re all at the conference.” So I went over there and got about three or four urologists, and started consulting with them, and we set up a plan, we were gonna set up to do peritoneal dialysis and hemo, no, hemodialysis on the pandas, so we anesthetized her again, and at that time we said, “Well, let’s get a look at the kidney. I wanted to get a biopsy of the kidney”, and so we’d done over the years quite a bit of work with laparoscopy, so Dave Wilt and I anesthetized the panda, and took a kidney biopsy, which, under direct visual observation laparoscopically, and then Dick Montale ran a frozen section, so we had the diagnosis before we woke the panda up, and it was the kidney was recovering. So that was by nice having the facilities, and having everything lined up, that we didn’t do any major problems. And then another time, the male panda, one morning they called me up, they said, “You better get down here, doctor, there’s something wrong.” And there was blood everywhere inside the male panda’s thing, looked like a kosher kill almost I could envision. And so my associate was Lindsey Phillips at the time, and he was on his way to Front Royal, and I said, “Get back here.” And we anesthetized it that night, and we’re ready for any catastrophic things, and did, again, brought in some specialists with their endoscopes, and looked down, looked there, and found one tiny ulcer in the lower intestine that must have ruptured to an artery, and there was nothing we had to do ’cause it had all closed up. But the nice thing about giant pandas is that with their gut is so short that you can run, go one way and see almost 80% of it, you know, when you do both directions. So we scoped him front and back, and got some information that way by the flexible gastroscope, so …
