Alright, so this is how it went down.
Arrive at the zoo around 7:30. The head zookeeper gives us a long safety talk, basically saying stay away from anywhere where the gorilla could grab you and rip your arms off. All the while there's a guy, we'll call him Jeff, standing quietly in the corner with a big ass shot gun at the low ready position. Now Jeff's job, as I'm sure you can deduce, is to "eliminate the threat" in case anything goes fubar.
Of course at this point, I'm questioning why I decided to do this, and how much trouble I'm going to get into with my wife if I happen to get my face eaten off. So, we go down through an OR suite and another procedure room to where all the cages are. The thing it kept reminding me of was the Velociraptor pen in Jurassic Park, and what do the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park always do? They get out and eat people.... Again, this instilled a lot of confidence in what was about to go down.
We got to the staging area, the first gorilla was chilling in her cage, rolling around, seeming like she was having a pretty good morning. This was until we busted out the blow dart gun (literally it's a blow dart gun, they said it's less traumatic than shooting it out of an actual gun, makes sense). At this point she, no pun intended, starts going ape ****. I mean, the females are probably around 40% smaller than the males, but I can totally see how if one of these wanted to stomp out your existence, there's not a whole lot that you could do about it.
So for blow dart induction it was:
0.1 mg/Kg midaz
0.5 mg/Kg Medetomidine
5mg/Kg Ketamine
When we blow dart her, she lets out this loud, deep, guttural yelp, staggers around for about two minutes until she decides to lay down for nap time. We wait another 10 minutes before approaching her, shes unresponsive, but breathing spontaneously. We move her to another cage where we're going to do the procedures. There's a cute little anesthesia machine about the size of a suitcase that i use to gas her down with iso (honestly it was nicer than the machines we use for mission work down in the Dominican). Now I'm sure we could have used a normal mask if they made a size 9 mask, but I don't think that exists, so we used a milk jug with the bottom cut out. Once I was confident that she was sufficiently deep, we opened her mouth with bungee cords. Now the key thing for intubating gorillas is to grab some 4x4 and pull the hell out of their tongue, which I got from the vid
@vector2 posted, thanks man! Once you do this, you can literally almost see epiglottis, so I just pooped a mac 5 in there and put an 8.5 in like normal business.
Once the tube was secured, I went to go pop in an IV. Great ape veins are definitely not like human veins, they actually have a pretty thick muscular walls, they feels more like arteries. We drew some blood and ran in LR, if for any reason she got light, we would have given propofol through the IV. They did their procedures, skin biopsies, echo, abd ultrasound etc, then it was time for wake up.
Now how do you wake up a gorilla you say? I would have thought deep, but no, no, no. So we turn off the gas and move her into the second cage that you can see in the second image, this is the gorilla PACU. Jeff is standing there just in case anything goes ****ey. The ETT is secured with plastic cord ties in a bow tie. Once she started to gag on the tube, I put my hand through the cage and quickly removed the ETT and bite block (the bite block being a door stopper wrapped in duct tape).
The second gorilla was way more relaxed, she actually let the vet tech inject her through the bars with the induction meds. This time I decided to use an LMA, a size 5 actually seated quite nicely, I'm sure for a larger male you'd need something bigger. At the end I exchanged the LMA for an ETT as the staff wasn't comfortable emerging with an LMA.
After emerging the second great ape, I went home, and my wife an I got ice cream and she told me how glad she was that my face didn't get eaten off.
