Dr Liza’s Vet Tales Excerpt – More After-Hours Adventures
Dr Liza’s Vet Tales Excerpt – More After-Hours Adventures
On Christmas that year I worked the after-hours shift and the day was very busy – cats don’t seem to believe in a peaceful festive season so many abscesses and bruised kitties from cat fights plus the occasional one getting hit by a car but thank goodness no major casualties. That night a little west highland terrier called “Jock” was rushed in by his very concerned owners as he had helped himself to some meat off the barbecue and had a bone stuck in his throat. He was choking and about to pass out.
I had just finished unblocking a cats bladder (they get crystals in their urine which blocks up the urethra stopping urine escaping from the bladder and if they don’t get help they can die) and rushed out into the consulting room to find a gasping Jock.
We quickly anaesthetized him and cleared his airway of all the accumulated saliva then passed a tube down his airway to keep it open. I couldn’t feel any bone at the back of his throat so next was to pass a tube down his oesophagus and make sure the bone had gotten to his stomach where it would likely be digested or if needed, was a much easier site to surgically remove it. No such luck, though, as the bone was stuck just before his stomach in the region of his diaphragm (the big breathing muscle separating the abdomen from the thorax) and I couldn’t push it through.
The bone had to come out, otherwise the blockage would cause major problems and the only way we were going to get to it was to do surgery. We prepared Jock for surgery, I poised my scalpel and then cut through Jocks stomach so that I could reach upward to his oesophagus and grab the bone but I battled to retrieve it, it was jagged and firmly lodged. Eventually I used a fabulous instrument called “Alice Tissue Forceps” and after a good while of struggling and a few unmentionable words passing between my lips, we finally had the bone out of Jock.
Next was to sew up and make sure that his abdomen was clean and not contaminated with content from his stomach. I was very worried though, how much trauma was done to the oesophagus (which doesn’t heal too well) by the sharp bone after all my pulling and pushing? Was the abdomen clean enough as any spillage of the gut content could cause major infection? Jock’s owners, being the fantastic dog owners that they are, wanted the very best for Jock and so at two a.m. on Boxing Day I managed to arrange a session of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy which would help to kill any bugs and give his body the best possible chance of healing at a much greater rate.
Pete, the director of chamber facility was fantastic and met us there; thank goodness he hadn’t suffered from an overdose of Christmas celebrations! We returned to the after-hours clinic at about 3:30a.m., Jock was looking good (he was alive and perky!) so into a cage he went to sleep off his rough night while I unblocked yet another cat that had just arrived!
By the time I had finished up with the kitty and gone to check on Jock he had chewed up his water bowl as well as the drip line going into his arm, and I imagined him thinking “I’m all better now and I want to go home where I sleep on a bed, what’s with this cage story?”! Jock went on to make an incredible recovery with no complications – just a very waggy tail and his owners delighted to have their boy happy and healthy.