: The Life of a Yorkshire Vet

by Norton, Julian

  Dogs have little discretion when it comes to diet, and will happily swallow all manner of inappropriate objects, either deliberately or accidentally. It is hard to understand why a dog would choose to eat something as unappetizing as a mobile phone, but it has happened. Also smelly socks, pants, cuddly toys, cassette tapes, lumps of bone and stones, to name but a few. We frequently have to lever out bits of bone or stick, which have become wedged across the top of a dog’s mouth, and one terrier was a regular visitor to have his jaws prized open after they had been glued together by the morning post, which he chewed up as it fell through the letter box.

  Dogs have amazing powers of digestion and it is surprising what can go down and be dealt with by the dog’s gastrointestinal system, without event. I was once on a farm testing a bull. It was in quarantine and I went to check its health status before it joined the rest of the herd. It took about twenty minutes to persuade the large bull to go into a cattle crush so I could collect the required blood and faecal samples. When I arrived at the farm, the small cocker spaniel belonging to the farmer was busily chewing on a rabbit that it had just caught. By the time I had finished with the bull, the little dog was just finishing the last few morsels of the rabbit, and I could just see its ears disappearing down the dog’s throat. Her stomach was bulging alarmingly but the little dog was completely unperturbed, and apart from not needing any tea that night, was none the worse for its bone-laden feast.

  One of my patients, a Labrador called Harvey, was one of life’s enthusiasts and completely unfussy about what went into his mouth. He was one of those dogs who does things first and thinks about things second. It is a trait common in young Labradors. In fact, I suspected Harvey didn’t actually do much thinking at all. The first time I met him at the surgery, as a pup, he had been investigating bees. He had investigated one particular bee a bit too closely and it had retaliated by stinging him on the nose. The result was a very swollen face and eyes so puffy that he could barely see out. His tail continued to wag vigorously and, other than his eyelids being squashed together, he seemed oblivious to his misfortune. The swelling subsided quickly after the appropriate steroid injection but I felt sure I would be seeing Harvey again.

  The next time we met, Harvey had been out for his morning walk around Sowerby Flatts. The Flatts is a lovely area of common land on either side of Cod Beck, the small river that flows through Thirsk on its way to the River Swale. It is a great place to walk dogs, and clients who live nearby often walk across the fields on their way to an appointment at the surgery.

  On this Saturday morning, Harvey had spent his walk pouncing on molehills. After several attempts, he had managed to catch a mole before it scuttled underground. He flipped it in the air with his nose, caught it in his jaws and swallowed the mole, whole.

  Harvey’s owner, Anne, rushed him to the practice. When they arrived there was great urgency in Anne’s voice: ‘Julian. It’s Harvey! He’s swallowed a mole. Whole!’

  I could tell from Harvey’s carefree expression and his continually wagging tail that he was not seriously ill. As I performed my examination, I placed a stethoscope on Harvey’s abdomen and listened intently for a while.

  ‘Oh my word! Anne, I can hear him squeaking in there!’

  Obviously this wasn’t true but I knew I could have a joke with Anne. After a brief moment, during which a look of horror crossed her face, she burst out laughing and all her tension and worry quickly dissipated.

  Harvey was fine and after a bottle of laxative to sooth the mole’s passage through Harvey’s bowels, all was well.

  On another occasion, an elderly gentleman shuffled into the waiting room with his Labrador, George (Labradors are over-represented when it comes to swallowing silly things). Through pursed lips he tried to explain what had happened. He thought that the dog had eaten his false teeth. Like all good Labradors in these circumstances, George stood there wagging his tail, oblivious to the gravity of the situation. At this point, it was difficult to work out who had the biggest problem, George or his owner. The old man was sure the teeth were inside his dog. He couldn’t find them anywhere. I palpated George’s abdomen but couldn’t feel anything that felt like a set of teeth. His owner was so certain they were in there, I took an x-ray. There was an area in the intestines that had a suspicious curved shadow, but no obvious teeth. I felt reluctant to operate on George because the x-rays did not show an obstructed pattern, there was no pain and no vomiting (the telltale sign that there is a serious obstruction). Again, it was down to good old laxatives to facilitate a rapid passage. The poor old man was instructed to check the faeces regularly for sign of the plastic teeth making an appearance. He and his dog came in every day for nearly two weeks with plastic bags of poo, so we could check them for teeth. Nothing was to be seen. We even repeated the x-rays, but there was nothing suspicious. We were left to conclude that George had not eaten the teeth after all. I never heard whether they ever did turn up. His owner had to get himself a new set.

  Bizarrely, contraceptive pills are another favourite of dogs, and they usually swallow the whole packet, foil and all. The amount of hormone in the tablets is very small, so causes no problem to the dog, but I always feel it must leave the owner extremely compromised. It is tempting, when speaking on the phone to an owner who is at once worried and slightly embarrassed, to try to make the situation better with humour. However, ‘Don’t worry, at least she won’t get pregnant … though you might,’ never seems to meet with much hilarity.

  I once spent a night removing the majority of a sofa from the stomach and intestines of a Great Dane. The message on the pager that evening said, ‘Great Dane. Eaten sofa. Please call.’ I didn’t believe this could be entirely true, a sofa being a sizable piece of furniture, but by three in the morning, Jon and I had managed to extract about three cushions’ worth of fabric and foam from inside the dog. While a sofa is large, so is a Great Dane’s intestinal tract!

  Cats, for some reason, prefer to swallow long, thin things such as rubber bands, tinsel or cotton thread, with or without the needle. Cats’ tongues are very rough, which is perfect for grooming, but something of a design fault when it comes to having a cotton thread in the mouth, because the thread gets stuck on the backwards-pointing spiky bits on the tongue and the only way the cat can dislodge it is to swallow. I remember one cat who swallowed a small piece of cotton thread with a sewing needle attached to it. I immediately admitted the cat for some x-rays of its throat, chest and stomach. Needles and anything metallic show up very clearly on an x-ray, but there was nothing to be seen. I went back to check the story again with the owners, but they were adamant that the needle had gone down. I was confused, so took a second x-ray of the cat’s abdomen, this time including the very last part of its intestine as well, although it seemed highly unlikely a needle could have woven its way all the way to the rectum without catastrophic effects. I was amazed to see the needle clearly visible. It was about three centimetres from its anus and had successfully negotiated safe passage all the way through the cat’s bowels and had come to a halt just before the final obstacle. I feared that the anus was an obstacle too far so, under anaesthetic, carefully removed the needle with forceps. A normal and safe unaided passage past this point did not seem possible, but it was truly astonishing that there had been no damage at all.

  A more unusual foreign body in a cat’s stomach was something altogether less spiky. It was a contraceptive, but not the tablet kind. Towards the end of a busy evening surgery, one of our new young vets, Steph, poked her head into the consulting room. ‘There’s a lady on the phone who thinks her cat has eaten a condom, what shall I do?’ I was a bit surprised – it seemed an unlikely thing for a cat to have eaten, but I suggested we see it, just to be safe. Steph admitted the cat when it arrived. Apparently, this condom had been in the waste paper bin, and the cat, who was actually just a five-month-old kitten, had retrieved it. It was, of course, a condom that had nothing whatsoever to do with the owner of the kitten, but everythi
ng to do with her flatmate. The plan was to anaesthetise the little cat, so we could have a look down into its stomach with the endoscope. ‘Come and give me a shout if you get stuck,’ I called into the prep room.

  Once I had finished consulting, I went to help. ‘How are you getting on?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t looked into a cat’s stomach before, so I’m not sure whether this is what it’s supposed to look like,’ Steph replied.

  I peered into the eyepiece of the endoscope. ‘NOT like that!’ was all I could say. All I could see was bright red. It slowly dawned on us that maybe the condom itself was bright red. One of us needed to go and put the question to the young lady, coyly sitting at the very end of the waiting room, ensconced in her mobile phone. Without flinching, Steph went to ask – yes, it was definitely red. Surprisingly, the young lady didn’t need to consult her flatmate on this point.

  So, out came the endoscopic grabber. This is a fancy piece of equipment, which consists of a tiny pair of pinchers on the end of a long, thin cable. It is fed down a channel on the inside of the endoscope and, by operating levers at the top of the cable, the grabbers can be opened and closed. It sounds as if it should be easy to use these to remove any type of foreign body from an animal, but the mouthparts are very small and, if the object is large or stuck fast, they are often not strong enough to retrieve the offending item. In this case, the offending item was very well lubricated, and it took several attempts to grab it securely. On the first go, all that came out on the grabbers was some unidentified gloop … However, once we got hold of it properly, the whole thing came slithering out very easily. Or rather, we hoped it was the whole thing, as there was a possibility the kitten could have chewed it into several pieces. Someone had to spread it out to make sure it was all there. It seemed obvious that this job should fall to the most junior vet in the practice. For once, it wasn’t me.

  We see all manner of nasty things in the operating theatre of a veterinary surgery, which regularly cause gasps of ‘urgh’ and ‘yuck’, but that particular piece of red latex caused more comment than most, because by now, the story had spread around the practice and any spare vet, nurse and receptionist had come to watch. The kitten was fine, though, and recovered quickly from the operation. We always put any foreign body removed from a patient into a plastic bag and return it to the owner – it seems only polite, if not interesting, and many owners find it amusing. Somehow, in this particular case, it didn’t seem an entirely appropriate thing to do.

  In a world designed for humans, it is not altogether surprising that animals, inquisitive and curious and, in the case of farm animals and horses, also clumsy, end up in all sorts of tangles, stuck in places they shouldn’t be. Once stuck, it is often impossible for them to extricate themselves and the vet is usually the first port of call, although in most circumstances the fire brigade would be the more useful emergency service. We don’t really have any special skills in rescuing animals wedged in awkward places, but often what is needed is someone to take charge and come up with a plan, and we are generally fairly good at that.

  Kittens have a great aptitude for getting their heads stuck in tin cans, while they are inquisitively looking for tasty morsels at the bottom of the tins. The problem is that a tin can is exactly the same size as the head of a young cat, and consequently it is easy for them to get stuck. Again, you do not need a veterinary degree to pull the cat out of the tin, but we are more often than not called upon to intervene in these instances.

  Late one evening, a very tiny tabby and white kitten, who we subsequently christened Sticky, was brought to the practice. He looked as if he was only about five weeks old. He was brought in by a chap who worked at a local industrial estate. In keeping with the agricultural heritage of the area, the industrial estates around Thirsk are full of factories making animal-related products – dog food, animal-feed flavourings and additives, ice cream, sausages, cheese flavouring and baby turkeys to name but a few. Some products, if they are destined for export around the world, need veterinary certification, so we spend quite a lot of time in one factory or another, filling in forms. I could imagine, therefore, exactly the place where poor Sticky had been before his rescue that evening by the kind man who was finishing his shift.

  The tiny kitten was stuck by all four feet and some of its fluffy body to something called a ‘glue trap’. A glue trap is a flat tray, a bit like a cat litter tray, full of very sticky glue. It is designed to catch vermin in an apparently benign way. Once a mouse or rat, or in this case Sticky, stands on the tenacious surface, it cannot move or escape and eventually dies of dehydration and starvation. This seems to me to be unnecessarily cruel and not at all benign. Surely the immediacy of a snapping trap would be preferable. But Sticky had been lucky (in fact, ‘Lucky’ is usually the name given to kittens who escape a seemingly certain death. In this case though, Sticky seemed more appropriate). Lucky and sticky though he was, he was also in a terrible mess. He was dehydrated, and very thin, but our first job was to free him from his gluey shackles. We clipped fur off his body to extricate him and then set about cutting the glue from his feet. Soon he was free and hungrily tucking into a big bowl of kitten food. He was safe, grateful and quickly on the mend and his condition soon improved. After a night’s hospitalization, he was back to full, mischievous health. However, residual bits of glue on his paws had collected fluff from his bedding, so by morning, he had enormous and ridiculous balls of fluff on all four feet, just as if he were wearing slippers. The man who had found him in the trap was more than happy to give Sticky a home, and he went to start life with his new family later that day. Needless to say, the glue traps at the factory were swiftly removed.

  ‘Dizzy’, although that wasn’t her real name, was another young cat nearly killed by her curiosity. She was rushed into the surgery late one morning. Hearing the receptionist’s half of a telephone conversation often gives a good indication of the severity of a situation. The words, ‘You’d better bring her straight down!’ always sets the pulse racing. On this occasion, the emergency appointment that appeared on the computer said: ‘Cat – been stuck in washing machine.’

  Before long, a distraught young lady appeared with a cat box and was ushered into the consulting room.

  ‘So, what seems to be the problem?’ My usual opening line seemed somewhat unnecessary.

  ‘Oh my God! She’s been in the washing machine!’ gasped the pale and shaking lady owner. ‘I realized too late – she’s been in there for over half an hour!’

  This sounded serious. She must have clambered into the machine, sniffing socks or looking for a cosy bed, before the washing tablet was added and the door closed.

  ‘Luckily it was only set for a half load, so it didn’t fill right up to the top with water, and I managed to stop it before she went through the spin cycle!’

  ‘Too right,’ I thought. A little kitten wouldn’t have survived spinning at 1200 rpm, and if the drum had filled to the top with water, she would have certainly drowned.

  I didn’t know what to expect when the kitten emerged from its box. It was an unusual sight. The cat was very wet (having missed the spin cycle, I suppose) and small. All animals are surprisingly small when wet, especially cats. Their normally fluffy fur makes them look much bigger than they really are underneath. Her feet were splayed out as far as possible to achieve a better balance, as her whole head and body went round and round and round, as if she were still in the washing machine. Her face was looking forward and her eyes were trying to focus straight ahead, searching for anything that was stationary. On closer inspection her eyes were going round and round as well. She was obviously very, very dizzy. I listened to her chest with my stethoscope. Thankfully, she had not inhaled any water. This was the main thing, for she could easily have drowned with fluid in her lungs. I could give her an anti-emetic injection that would stop the feeling of nausea and dizziness. We had a new drug that was designed for treating motion sickness, and this was the perfect time to use it. After t
his injection and by the following morning, Dizzy had made a complete and uneventful recovery and was soon on her way home. On the plus side, her ears were spotless and she was lovely and clean!

  Farm animals are no less inquisitive but considerably more clumsy. Sheep have a terrible tendency to get themselves tangled in fences, and lambs often appear to have a death wish when it comes to buckets of water. Young lambs spend the first two or three days of life in a pen with their mother, allowing them to learn to suckle and to form a bond that will keep them safe once turned out into the fields. These ‘lambing pens’ are usually quite small, so the mothers and babies can form this bond without distractions, and without losing one another, which they are apt to do in a bigger enclosure. However, an unintended consequence is that, occasionally, incompetent lambs find themselves stuck in the water bucket. Dozy mothers are even more of a problem. While on lambing duties, as a veterinary student, I arrived in the shed early one morning to find a ewe that had, unwittingly, rolled over in the night and onto its lamb. The poor lamb was completely stuck between its mother and the side of the pen. At this time we would often refer to sick lambs, which needed extra attention – more milk or the warmth of the Aga in the farmhouse kitchen – as being ‘a bit flat’. This particular lamb was, sadly, literally flat. There was no hope for him. Not even the warm Aga would help. He was completely squashed.

  When a cow gets stuck in the wrong place, there is often the need not just for the vet but also for heavy lifting equipment. It is not too uncommon to be summoned to a cow that is stuck in a river or a ditch. Their gentle amblings seem to get them into tight spots and their subsequent attempts at freeing themselves often result in them becoming even more stuck.