Patient Story – Ophelia

OPHELIA 

Ophelia is a 4 month old labrador who ate an ice lolly including the stick! The next day she started vomiting and wouldn’t eat her breakfast which was very unusual, so her owners brought her in to see us.

During her examination we could feel a gassy area in her abdomen but she wasn’t painful.  Since we knew she had definitely eaten the stick we recommended further investigation. Ophelia was anaesthetised for an x-ray of her abdomen. This showed a small amount of gas in her stomach but the stick itself couldn’t be seen since wood doesn’t show up on xrays.

The gas build up in her stomach made us strongly suspicious that the stick was causing a blockage so we used a special camera called an endoscope to look inside her stomach. The endoscope is a long thin tube with a bright light and high resolution camera which passes down the oesophagus and into the stomach. This allows us to see inside the body without having to perform invasive surgery.

We quickly located the lolly stick  which was lodged in Ophelia’s stomach and managed to safely retrieve it, fully intact, back up her oesophagus and out of her mouth!

Ophelia recovered well and was back to her normal happy, hungry self within a couple of hours.