An owner brought in her perfectly normal-looking, healthy female cat (about 2 years old) named Claus. According to the owner, Claus was left unsupervised in her son's room. Her son had been playing with his Nerf darts. When the two came back into the room, the tips of the darts were still there, but the foam ends were gone. The owner insisted that Claus had chewed them off and eaten them.
I suggested that perhaps Claus had just relocated the ends to underneath the sofa, since cats aren't notorious foreign body eaters. No, she insisted, Claus had eaten them! I suggested an xray to assess the stomach with plans to go from there. I fully expected to see an empty stomach. I was fully wrong. The stomach was PACKED with foam darts.
Now the dilemma. Cats - unlike dogs - are extremely difficult to induce vomiting in. A dog - give a shot of apomorphine and stand back. A cat - well, a cat may or may not respond to a dose of xylazine, a dose of Dexdomitor, or a dose of hydromorphone or morphine. Cats just like to scoff at whatever works in a dog.
Crossing my fingers, I gave a dose of Dexdomitor intra-muscularly, then jostled poor Claus around as vigorously as I could ("vigorous external gastric massage" is what we've taken to calling this technique). About 10 minutes later, the kitty obliged us and vomited (YAY! success!). To our amazement, Claus vomited up this mess:
Thankfully, xray showed that they were all out of the stomach, and Claus went on to likely eat other, equally odd objects.
2 comments:
Good heavens... how did he manage to eat all that. lol
My cats are both so fussy they will only eat one type of food so trying to switch my recently blocked male cat to special food is not going so well. Now I feel lucky!
"cats aren't notorious foreign body eaters" What about plastic bags? Just about every cat I've known will munch on those, if possible.
Post a Comment