Submitted by Tim Kolb, DVM. Banfield, The Pet Hospital – Easton Market, OH.
We certainly have had our share of memorable cases. Here’s a compilation of cases that all involved the Pet eating some strange or foreign object.
Meet Skipper, a Jack Russell Terrier who ate dental floss. One piece went from under the tongue all the way to the colon. This was a very serious problem due to the sawing nature of the floss. He had extensive damage to the intestines and some areas of the distal jejunum (middle portion of the small intestine) had perforated and were leaking digesta. The floss was found in the stomach as well. Skipper endured very extensive surgery that included a resection of damaged bowel, anastamosis (joining together two hollow organs [viscus], usually to restore continuity after resection, or to bypass an unresectable disease process), enterotomy (surgical cutting of intestine) and gastrotomy (incision into the stomach). Skipper is doing great now. He was a very lucky dog.
Luther, a male Labrador Retriever, had a history of eating things repeatedly and had emergency surgery for ingesting a “foreign body. ” One week he ate a sponge. The owner told us the sponge was of regular size, roughly 2″ x 5″, with a scrubbing side. The owner couldn’t afford having the surgery done again and requested we induce vomiting, so we gave Luther apomorphine. He vomited the entire sponge, and, as an added bonus, also vomited the owner’s intact underwear.
Amanda is a Terrier who came in vomiting and had diarrhea, presented with a severely dilated stomach and a granular material along her stomach wall. She happened to eat a large amount of gorilla glue that was left on a counter. The bottle was about 1/3 full but the owner didn’t really know how much Amanda had ingested because there was glue found on the floor as well. Another concern the owner had was the fact that the glue expands when wet. Surgery was done to remove the large glob from the stomach. We were able to pull the glue out in one ball and there were no complications.
If anything can be learned from this, it would be the importance of watching your Pets and keeping items like socks, underwear, sponges, glue, and the like, up and out of the way.
