by Helen Stephens
This is Charlie. He is an eleven year old Jack Russell. He came in to see Grant on a Saturday afternoon after devouring a kebab on a stick. Charlie believed in not taking any chances and chewing his food as he might get caught, so he swallowed the kebab plus stick whole. Fortunately for Charlie his owner had seen his actions so was able to get him seen by the vet straight away.
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After seeing Grant it was decided that Charlie would have
endoscopy to see if the stick was still lurking in his stomach. This would mean he would have a general
anaesthetic and have a camera put into his stomach. On doing this Grant was confronted with a lot
of food in his stomach as Charlie has also recently had his elevenses. It was quite difficult to find the kebab
stick in amongst all the other food.
Eventually Grant saw the end of a stick like object in the top of
Charlie’s stomach. He used a pair of
grabbing forceps to see if he could get a hold of the stick. Fortunately he did and was able to pull the
stick back towards the opening of the stomach.
As he was removing the stick Grant found it difficult to pull the stick
out of the stomach. He realised that the
meat on the kebab was causing the difficulty.
With a bit of a tug the stick came clean out leaving the pieces of kebab
meat safely in Charlie’s stomach. As his
owner later pointed out Charlie still got his own way in the end!
The endoscope proved invaluable in this case. Had we not have had this useful piece of
equipment Charlie would have needed a major operation to open up his stomach to
retrieve the stick. Had the owners not
witnessed Charlie’s crime he would have possibly been in a life threatening
situation and the outcome would have been much less certain. The great news is Charlie has made a speedy
recovery but kebabs are definitely off the menu!