|
 The first time Thistle was ill, the diagnosis seemed very straightforward. He had vomited a few times and brought up furballs. This is very common, especially when animals are overgrooming (for example because of fleas, though there were none here). So we treated him with liquid paraffin paste to help him pass any further furball that was left in his stomach, expecting not to see him again. At his re-check 4 days later, he was improving, but not as well as he should be. There was still nothing else to find on clinical examination, and we gave him more time to improve.
However, he continued to be just a bit under the weather, until suddenly one day he deteriorated badly, and started vomiting again, becoming dull and hunched. Following ‘Murphy’s Law’, this was, of course, in the early hours of the morning, but his owner sensibly called us anyway for advice. He was admitted immediately. While the diagnosis was still not certain on examination, and x-rays showed no obvious problem, we decided on emergency exploratory surgery.
The result? The rubber teat of baby’s dummy was lodged in his stomach. It was too small to be felt when examining him, and too soft to show up on X-rays, but nevertheless had become a life-threatening problem.
 Such items, correctly called ‘foreign bodies’ can cause minimal problems, as they did here for several days or weeks, until they try to pass out of the stomach into the much narrower intestine, when they cause a complete blockage. It’s very unusual to find a foreign body in a cat as they are fastidious feeders – it’s much more common in dogs, which can eat outrageous items. In my student days, the vet school kept a box of items retrieved from dogs’ intestines, and it includes a length of chain, and both halves of a bikini!
But that was not the end of his story. Thistle did really well for 4 months, but deteriorated again. The result was further surgery to remove another dummy! Some detective work by his owner sourced the dummies to the neighbour’s baby. Thankfully the baby has grown out of dummies and we have no further problems, though he was seen a few days ago because he’d (probably) tried to chew a toad - toads have toxic chemicals for defence which cause mouth irritation and severe salivation, and he was drooling everywhere!
|
