Foreign Bodies

We were having a discussion yesterday on items that pets have swallowed apart from the usual balls that get stuck some place and require an operation or we manage to get them to vomit with a timely dose of apamorphine.
This conversation came about as we were trying to decide what the soft chunk of blue rubber was from the dog’s intestines. It turned out the owners recognised it as a piece of plastic from the dog’s tugger toy.

Swallowed commonly are: Chunks of corn on the cob or bones, bits of plastic, needles and thread, panties, pantyhose, stones, golf balls, chocolates and medication.

Sometimes if you have a good enough x-ray you can play the guess what it is game. A friend of mine said that they never worked out the thing they saw was a small concrete frog the GSD had swallowed.

Pantyhose and long items can be a major problem as they can end up telescoping the intestines and have seen a few animals die through complications or take a longer recovery as multiple holes have to be made in the intestines and remove the item piecemeal.

For those in UK that use bounty to clean up spills apparently that goes into a hard ball in the stomach and if you big you have problems, it doesn’t dissolve like normal spill and wipe paper. That is from a VN who had to do an op on her dog to remove said item.

The last couple of needle swallows l have been involved in with dogs the vets made the decision to wait. Every time the dog’s passed faeces we had to x-ray it. Oh such a glamorous job. On cats though, l have never known a wait they always go in to retrieve it.

The SVN l was speaking to was telling me about a kitten that was about 4 months old and was fine, eating, drinking, and playing perfectly apart from horrendous breath. The vet opened it’s mouth and caught a very fast glimpse of something? They gave it a GA and x-ray and there was a huge bodkin needle (big and thick) at the very back of the throat jammed upwards. She had to do an op slicing through the roof of the mouth upwards to dislodge it and pull it downwards flat, not easy in a tiny kitten with a tiny mouth and retrieved the needle. The breath cleared up.

Many years ago when l locumed the first time round l went into work at one of my regular places and was told of an incident the week before. The vet and nurse had popped a dog that appeared to have something stuck onto the table and took an x-ray. On development there was an entire breadknife stuck inside the stomach. The vet said they went from casual handling to treating it like it was gelignite that was going to blow up it was very scary. The case made the national papers.

Some cases stick in my mind, like the dog that ate a tampax and we gave it apamorphine…only there was at least 12 used ones came up. The dog was not the only one that wanted to throw up l think we all did.

There was the dog that ate the used condom and caused a divorce. It was the wife’s boyfriends and the husband found out as not everyone had been warned what was going on. The vet informed him at the check up when he asked what had happened, as he had been away when the dog was treated.

One owner l knew many years ago had a stock of french mustard in. His dog as is typical of Labradors ate everything and if he was in time and knew what the dog had eaten he gave him a good dollop. Apparently french mustard made the dog throw up english mustard didn’t! Unfortunately the dog died after eating panty hose, it telescoped the intestines and complications set in.