I'm posting this photograph of my former associate in surgery a couple of years ago. (She moved out of state, I didn't have a contract put out on her). This dog had eaten a large amount of carpeting and thought that it would be best if we took it out of a new opening since it wouldn't pass out of any existing natural holes in the body. Both dog and veterinarian did very well. so well, that we got to repeat the entire procedure when the dog did it again.
This illustrates a point that I feel that I have to make, we can't leave our pets alone with things that might be dangerous. We saw the kitten that ate the needle in an earlier post. By the way, she came in for suture removal and is doing well. Just to prove that kittens are not all members of Mensa, her owner caught her trying to eat a tooth pick before she was even fully recovered from the first surgery.
Our pets will do things that are dangerous time and time again. They will eat non food items time and time again. They will get into the garbage and end up with horrible gastro enteritis time and time again. And we think, "stupid pet". In reality, it's stupid owners. We have to protect them from themselves. Do not lock them in rooms with Berber carpet that is their favorite flavor. Keep sharp pointy objects away from them. Do not let them in the garbage.
Side note on garbage. We think that our dogs get diarrhea and vomiting because they ate greasy garbage. That might be part of the problem in some instances. I think that a large number of these dogs actually get food poisoning from bacterial toxins in the garbage. Remember, garbage is spoiled food. It is ... well garbage. The same bacteria such as salmonella, e coli, campylobacter, staph, you name it , the same bacteria that make us sick, can make them sick and it does. Time and time again. Keep them out of the garbage.
And just like our children, keep them away from house hold products that might be dangerous.
We admitted a kitten to the hospital today that sat in a puddle of this product. Lysol, kills germs. After all it is a quaternary ammonium disinfectant. Hard on bacteria, hard on cats. This kitty knocked the bottle over and then sat in the puddle while mom ran off to get some paper towels to clean up the mess. The bad news is that cats are very sensitive to these products. Even worse news, when we called the 800 number on the bottle, the lovely person on the other end of the phone did not know that this product is dangerous to cats. They were helpful and tried to get us a poison control number, but by the time they figured out what was going on, we had all the information that we needed from several of our Internet sources and had started therapy.
The biggest problem that these detergents cause in cats is physical trauma to the oral cavity. Ulcers, tissue damaging, even complete soughing of the tongue. This cat had some much mucous it inhaled some into it's lungs. (sorry to radiographs to post this time). A bath, some steroids, some respiratory nebulization to clear the secretions and so far so good. Unfortunately, we might not know the extent of the damage for a couple of days. Hopefully, I'll not have any pictures of oral pathology to share with you. Most of the ones that I saw on line were post mortem. This is nasty stuff.
So please, be careful out there.
Keith Niesenbaum, VMD
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