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Ouch!!! It was pretty bad.
This is a picture of Yodi's left side.  The two areas closest to his front leg that are stapled are from the doctor's incisions during surgery.  The incisions were made so that the doctor could get in and repair the tears in the tissue and muscle in Yodi's chest wall.  The area to the right of the picture is a bite wound that was stitched up.  Yodi also had quite a few small tooth-sized puncture wounds that were left open and healed on their own.  Yodi was given a stick-on patch for the pain.  (That's the clear sticker thing on him near the top of the picture.) Most of the tissue on Yodi's left side in this picture ended up going into necrosis, meaning the tissue wasn't healing and was instead, dying and decaying.  We saw the tissue in this state and it both looked and smelled awful.  We were given surgical masks to help keep the smell away from our noses, but they didn't really help.  I ended up just taking mine off so I could give Yodi kisses.  The decaying tissue was removed surgically so that new, healthy tissue could grow in and replace it.  Because so much tissue was removed, Yodi ended up needing a skin graft, which took place a week or so after his amputation surgery.  The doctor that did his amputation surgery also did the skin flap surgery.  He chose a skin flap procedure, rather than a skin graft, because the area that needed to be repaired was so large. So instead, he did a skin flap which required a single, long incision that travels from near Yodi's front shoulder, down along his side, and curvies upwards in front of his back legs. After the incision, the skin was moved and pulled tight to cover the area that needed to be repaired, and stitched into place. The stitches from Yodi's skin flap and the amputation are actually very smooth and flat and I doubt that you'll even be able to see them once his hair all grows back.
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