It’s a Vet’s Life!
Welcome to a new feature for Link magazine from Dr Nicky Hallows BVMS MRCVS, Clinical Director at Nute Veterinary Surgery in Wadebridge. Each edition I will try to give you a run down of some of the more interesting cases we see at the surgery. We treat pretty much all species so an average day for a vet here can involve tending to a cow calving one moment and a rabbit the next! It really is all creatures great and small. Starting with the small, as I write this one of our vets is operating on a guinea pig. Guinea pigs are prone to eye problems and this one sadly has gone too far to save the eye. However one of our vets is in the process of removing the eye. Within a day or two the little pig will be feeling much better and soon adjusting to its new vision. General anaesthetic can be quite tricky in what we call the ‘small furries’ : guinea pigs, hamsters, gerbils etc because we normally deliver anaesthetic by gas with a tube that goes down an animals windpipe. These small furries’ windpipes are too small for this so we usually use a combination of injections and/or a little mask. The summer has been marked with the usual influx of holiday makers and unfortunately every year we see at least one and usually several dogs that have gone over a cliff edge. Some are relatively lucky some less so. It is amazing what lengths the lifeboat crew have been to in the past to rescue animals stranded on rocks. It is often a carefree dog chasing a seagull when the ground runs out and although it’s usually holiday makers’ dogs, sometimes we do see local dogs too. I would always recommend keeping your dog on a lead when out on the clifftops. We have also seen our fair share of dogs that have snaffled up what they thought was just a tasty morsel of fish or bait only to 28
discover a fishing hook on the end. We see these stuck anywhere from lips and tongues right down to stomachs. The problem is that fish hooks once embedded, will never come out the way they have gone in. We have to remove the eye end and then force the hook through the otherside of wherever it’s stuck. This usually requires an anaesthetic and is obviously more straight forward for the dog with a hook in its tongue as opposed to one that has got down to the stomach. Here is an xray of a dog with the hook pretty obviously sat in the middle of the black gas of the stomach. Fortunately, and rather unusually when we passed a camera into the stomach we could see that the hook hadn’t embedded into the stomach wall and we were able to pull it out carefully keeping the tip covered with a piece of tube. If it had been embedded we would have had to open the dog up and go from the inside. Finally on the larger side of the job we have seen several farms have outbreaks of Xray image of fishhook in dog’s stomach
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