et talk	View Pet Talk Archive >>

Bobby Bottle Top and Other Stories.

Bobby is a very bouncy nine-year-old spaniel who really ought to know better by now. He was brought in to the surgery having started vomiting for a few days on and off. As dogs age the list of possible diagnoses tends to change. For example most dogs get their eating of bizarre objects done when they are young, experimenting puppies. Not Bobby.

When he was first seen he had been sick a couple of times but nothing untoward and had a bit of an ear infection too. He was treated for an upset stomach as his owner had pointed out that he will “eat anything”. A couple of days passed and he started to whimper and was standing in a way that suggested he had pain inside. He was admitted to hospital and started on fluids because the vomiting was starting to leave him a little dehydrated.

An xray quickly showed why he had all the signs he did and also supported his owner’s claim that he would, indeed, eat anything. It fell to my husband to open the poor lad up that weekend and it was him and the nurse on duty who nicknamed him bottletop Bobby. Sure enough, in his small intestine was the top from a bottle of beer (I’m not privy to what the preferred brand was).

A couple of days in hospital and some more fluids soon saw Bobby’s bounce return and he is now in search of his next mystery object. Ours is a job of many surprises as the years go by and one of my favourite things is pulling paraphernalia out of dogs’ intestines. This may sound like an odd thing to get excited about but they usually make great stories and I love soft tissue surgery so foreign bodies are a double bonus for me.

Mark and I were chatting that night and started recounting our best foreign body stories (yes, those evenings in our house just fly by). My favourite was featured a couple of years ago when another spaniel, if I remember correctly, had swallowed the whole inside of a kinder surprise egg. The x-ray actually showed the little toy in the egg and Julie the nurse and I had excellent fun guessing what the toy would be. It was in fact some kind of space monkey.

I’ve also removed a number of peach stones, normal stones and the rubber bung from the end of a walking stick from a rather smelly Samoyed. The latter sticks in the mind because the x-ray was great but also because it took almost as long to clip and clean the dog as it did to remove the object. Fishing hooks, fishing line, rubber balls and even knives have been removed from our canine companions over the years. And before you ask, I have no idea how a Staffie manages to swallow a six-inch bread knife and still wag its tail!

All that said I think Mark has a winning story. He has a client whose dog has a not uncommon habit of raiding the laundry bin. We all know dogs go for some nasty things but dirty laundry somehow takes the biscuit. Having said that it would be a brave or foolish dog that attempted one of Mark’s socks! Anyway, this dog had swallowed socks in the past and had them removed by way of the surgeon’s knife. The owner had become alerted to this by the appearance of an odd sock after a particularly savage laundry raid and the ensuing vomiting that followed.
Sure enough a few months later she phoned Mark and said the dog was vomiting again and not keeping food down. She had then gone to check through the laundry bin and found another odd sock so was pretty sure the other one was lurking inside the beast.

He was promptly admitted and anaesthetised for an x-ray. Many objects do not show up well on plain x-rays because they appear as the same density as many soft tissues so only metal and bone tend to give cracking “oh my god, look at that” x-rays. We usually x-ray anyway in case there is another cause and also to spot the tell tale signs of a foreign body that you can’t actually see such as loops of distended bowel.

In this case Mark peered at the rather unexciting x-ray for several minutes trying to discern if anything was there. After a time he started to become aware of an odd pattern right down in the rectum of the dog, much further through than most objects get. He thought he’d have a feel inside and sure enough he thought he could feel some fabric right at the tip of his reach. He snagged the end and started to pull triumphantly. In my mind’s eye Mark always appears at this point to resemble a magician pulling brightly coloured tissues from his sleeve although I know in truth that the image and the fetid object were quite grim in comparison.

It was with great glee that Mark called the owner back after waking the dog up having escaped the knife for the second time. ‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news’ he said. ‘The good news is that we didn’t have to open him up because the foreign body was in his rectum. The bad news is that I haven’t managed to find your odd sock…(theatrical pause for effect)…but I have retrieved a very nice pair of knickers!’

The owner was a little bashful as she came to collect her charge that night and, strangely enough, declined Mark’s kind offer to have the knickers back.

View Pet Talk Archive >>     |    Back to Top